Professor Scott Cockroft is the 2024 recipient of the van der Waals Prize (young scientist). The prize distinguishes scientists of high scientific merit who have contributed in an outstanding way to the development of the field of noncovalent interactions. Johannes Diderik van der Waals was a Dutch physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1910 for deriving the equations for exchange between the liquid and gas states. The forces between molecules that are responsible for molecules sticking together, later became associated with his name, as did the distance between atoms in the solid state. Van der Waals forces occur between all atoms and are accordingly responsible not only for the states of matter that we observe in the universe but are intrinsic to the operation of the molecules of life. In particular, van der Waals interactions play an essential role in the molecular recognition capabilities and activity of biological enzymes and the reactions they catalyse. The Cockroft group have been examining the principles and origins of molecular recognition from a combined experimental and computational perspective since Scott's appointment at the university of Edinburgh in 2007. van der Waals (died in 1923) and Scott Cockroft "I am honoured to be awarded this prize (and also still to be classified as a young person!). As I mentioned in my inaugural lecture not so long ago, I remember asking my high-school chemistry teacher for more information about "van der Waals interactions" after seeing the term in our chemistry textbook. Three years later, I saw my first x-ray crystal structure of a drug-protein complex on a work placement at AstraZeneca. Nine years after that, my first independent research grant was entitled "How much do van der Waals interactions contribute to molecular recognition in solution?", and shortly after that I published a paper an almost identical title in Nature Chemistry. Since then, we have learned even more about the nature and energetics molecular interactions using a combination of synthesis, experiment, and computational chemistry. Thank you to all the people who have worked in my group on projects probing the origins of molecular recognition!" Scott's prize will be officially announced at the 3rd International Conference on Non-covalent Interactions in Belgrade, Serbia 17-21 June 2024, where he will also deliver a lecture. The van der Waals prize was established in 2019 by the Chairs of the International Conference of Non-covalent Interactions (Prof. Armando J. L. Pombeiro and Dr. Kamran T. Mahmudov), and alternates between senior and junior awardees each year: 2019 Prof. Pavel Hobza (senior scientist) 2020 Prof. Alexander Tkatchenko (young scientist) 2021 Prof. Giuseppe Resnati (senior scientist) 2022 Prof. Hongbo Zeng (young scientist) 2023 Prof. Gautam R. Desiraju (senior scientist) 2024 Prof. Scott L. Cockroft (young scientist) This article was published on 2024-05-10
