Professor Scott Miller

Professor Scott Miller
Department of Chemistry
Yale University

Comparative Catalysis

At the dawn of asymmetric catalysis, most organic chemists viewed highly selective catalysts as rare needles to be found in haystacks. Decades later, excellent catalysts are still hard to define, and to develop. Yet, progress in the field has been rapid, and it is now often possible to find more than one type of catalyst that is effective for a given enantioselective reaction. When that happens, are the catalysts similar? Are similar functional outcomes born of mechanistic homology? Or are there generally multiple mechanistic scenarios that can lead to highly selective catalysts for the same reaction? What lessons for catalyst design may be extracted from comparative studies of this nature? This lecture will present the results of comparative studies of catalysts that are often viewed as privileged to peptide-based catalysts that have been advanced to catalyze similar reactions.

Scott Miller

Scott J. Miller received his B.A. (1989), M.A. (1989) and Ph.D. (1994) from Harvard University, where he worked with David Evans as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Subsequently, he traveled to the California Institute of Technology where he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with Robert Grubbs until 1996. For the following decade, he was a member of the faculty at Boston College, until joining the faculty at Yale University in 2006. In 2008, he was appointed as the Irénée du Pont Professor of Chemistry, and in 2023 as a Sterling Professor of Chemistry. At Yale, he served as Chair of the Chemistry Department from 2009-2015, and as the Divisional Director for Science from 2015-2017. Professor Miller’s research program focuses on asymmetric catalysis. His group employs strategies that include catalyst design, the development of techniques for catalyst screening, and the application of new catalysts to the preparation of biologically active agents. Several current interests are (a) the selective functionalization of complex molecules, (b) the exploration of analogies between synthetic catalysts and enzymes, (c) the discovery of effective antibiotics despite increasing resistance, and (d) the engineering of the biosynthetic apparatus for nonextant bond-formation. Scott Miller’s awards and honors include: National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1999), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2000), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2000), Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society (2004), Yoshimasa Hirata Memorial Gold Medal of Nagoya University (2009), National Institutes of Health MERIT Award (2011), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), American Chemical Society Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2016), Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016), Max Tishler Prize, Harvard University (2017), Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2018), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Invitational Fellowship for Research (2019), Member, National Academy of Sciences (2020), Remsen Award, Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society and Johns Hopkins University (2023), Philadelphia Organic Chemistry Club Allan Day Award (2025), Gabor A. Somorjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis of the American Chemical Society (2026). In 2024, he was also awarded the Wasserman Prize for Excellence in Teaching Undergraduate Chemistry at Yale University, and in 2026, the Dylan Hixon ‘88 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences, Yale College Professor Miller has served in number of capacities for public and private organizations. For example, he recently completed terms on the Advisory Council of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the Advisory Council for Center for Scientific Review, both convened by the Director of the National Institutes of Health. He now serves as Editor-in- Chief of The Journal of Organic Chemistry.

Hosted by Professor Courtney Roberts