Donna Blackmond

Donna Blackmond, Ph.D., (born April 19, 1958) is an American chemical engineer whose work focuses on prebiotic chemistry, specifically, the origin of enantiopurity (homochirality) and kinetics of asymmetric catalytic reactions. Notable works include the development of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA), analysis of non-linear effects of catalyst enantiopurity, biological homochirality and amino acid behavior. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013.

Blackmond was born on April 19, 1958 in Pittsburgh, PA, where she attended University of Pittsburgh and received her undergraduate and master's degree in Chemical Engineering. She received the Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984. She became a professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh shortly after graduating. Blackmond remained in academia for 8 years before moving on to the Associate Director position at Merck & Co., Inc. Her main responsibility at the company was to set up a laboratory for research and development in the kinetics and catalysis of organic reactions. Blackmond is now a Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Her most current research applies the quantitative aspects of her chemical engineering background to the synthesis of complex organic molecules by catalytic routes, particularly asymmetric catalysis.

She has one son, Daniel Trevor Blackmond Bradley, who is a musician, comedian, actor and postman.

Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis

Blackmond has pioneered the methodology of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA), which is used for rapid determination of concentration dependences of reactants. RPKA allows for in situ measurements to produce a number of rate equations that enable analysis of a reaction using a minimal number of experiments. The purpose for this type of analysis is to help understand what the driving force of a reaction might be and describe possible mechanistic pathways. This technique distinguishes rate processes occurring on the catalytic cycle from those occurring off the cycle. Notable applications of RPKA include asymmetric hydrogenation, asymmetric organocatalytic reactions, palladium catalyzed carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen bond forming reactions, and transition-metal catalyzed competitive reactions.

Nonlinear effects of catalyst enantiopurity

Nonlinear effects describe the non-ideal relationship between enantiomeric excess (ee) of products of a reaction and the ee of the catalyst, a phenomenon first observed by Henri Kagan. Kagan developed mathematical models to describe this non-ideal behavior, ML_n models. Blackmond has performed studies that have led to an understanding of reaction rate and its relationship to catalyst ee. Many proposed mathematical models have been tested in the Blackmond lab, which have helped determine possible mechanistic features of reactions, including the Soai reaction. The Soai reaction is of abiotic synthetic interest because it is an autocatalytic reaction, which rapidly produces a large amount of enantiopure products. Blackmond was the first to use Kagan's ML₂ model to study the non-linear effects of this reaction. She was the first to conclude that a homochiral dimer was the active catalyst in promoting homochirality for the Soai reaction.

Biological homochirality and amino acid phase behavior

More recently, Blackmond has extended kinetic models to describe the origin of biological homochirality. She has shown solutions of mostly enantiopure amino acids can be produced from nearly racemic mixtures via solution-solid partitioning of the enantiomers. The discovery that eutectic mixtures could be manipulated, depending on the components of the mixture, allows for changes to the crystal structure and solubility of substances. Amino acids can solidify in two ways, as a mixture of D and L enantiomers or as a single enantiomers. Partitioning of molecules occurs between the liquid and solid phases, such that enantiopure amino acids will get "stuck" in either phase.

• Royal Society of Chemistry Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, 2009
• Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, 2007
• Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, 2005
• Miller Institute Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley, 2003
• The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Award in Process Technology, 2003
• Organic Reactions Catalysis Society’s Raul Rylander Award, 2003
• Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, 2002–2003
• North American Catalysis Society’s Paul H. Emmett Award, 2001
• NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1986–91