The ICS prizes

The ICS prizes will be awarded at the opening ceremony of the Annual Meeting of the Society on February 5th 2001. The winners are:
Prof. Moshe Shapiro from the Weizmann Institute.
Prof. Sasson Shaik from the Hebrew University.

SASON SHAIK

is awarded the  Israel  Chemical  Society  Prize  for  the  year  2000
for his seminal work in the area of chemical reactivity and bonding.

Sason Shaik is a Professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry, in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He was a student of N. D. Epiotis in the University of Washington, Seattle WA, and a postdoctoral fellow with the
Nobel Prize Laureate Roald Hoffmann, in Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

Shaik has been a leading proponent, worldwide, of valence-bond theory and of curve-crossing models, to explain chemical bonding and reactivity.  This approach is quite different from the conventional Woodward-Hoffmann approach, based on molecular-orbital theory, although in the limit both models are equivalent. It permits insights into bonding and reactivity that may be obscured by the molecular-orbital model.

He has shaken the world of organic chemistry with his valence-bond view of electron delocalization in aromatic compounds and made us all think about aromatic delocalization in a completely new light.

Recently, he has made innovative contributions to bonding description
of metal oxo species, and on the biological oxidation of hydrocarbons by
cytochrome P-450.

Sason Shaik is currently viewed as one of the most influential practitioner
in the area of qualitative prediction in chemical changes since Roald Hoffmann.  His international reputation can be gauged from the ISI list of the 1000 "most
cited chemists during 1981-1997", ranking him in the highest quadrant of the
list (in average citations per paper).