Deadline February 15th
The D. John Faulkner Award is available to active members of the ASP who are within five years of their first independent appointment, to support their attendance at the ASP Annual Meeting. Born in Bournemouth, England, John received his BSc in Organic Chemistry with first class honors (1962) and his PhD in Organic Chemistry (1965) from Imperial College, London under the guidance of Sir Derek Barton. John held postdoctoral fellowships with Professor R. B. Woodward at Harvard University and Professor William S. Johnson at Stanford University. At the age of 26, John was appointed as an Assistant Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, where he remained on the faculty until his untimely death in 2002.
John came from humble beginnings, an only child that grew up in a poor working class home with a deaf father.He was a child protégé earning a spot at Imperial College and his PhD at 23. John had a deep understanding of chemistry and how to apply chemical methods to structure determination studies. He also had an amazing ability to visualize chemical structures and interpret chemical reactivity and spectroscopic data in terms of how a molecule presented in three dimensions. John always had a saying that a structure has to fit all of the data and all of the data has to fit a structure.
Chemistry was more than an avocation to John, it was his love and his passion. John was 26 when he started his career at Scripps and actually younger than his first graduate student, Dr. Mike Petersen. I think his young age and his childhood contributed to some viewing John as harsh and intimidating. He was an exacting mentor, always teaching and challenging us. You had to earn John’s respect! John set high expectations for his students, but he was always an advocate and supporter of his trainees and their careers.
John always believed it was important to give back to science for the opportunities that he received. In addition to training next generations of scientists, John committed a major amount of his time to comprehensively curating the literature on marine natural products and creating annual reviews in Natural Products Reports. John’s reviews became the quintessential resource for scientists around the world interested in marine natural products. These reviews represented a single handed effort on John’s part to retrieve and review the literature, write the reviews and draw all of the structures by hand!
Amusingly, Dr. David Newman had one of John’s first compilations of his reviews, since he swapped him a “semi-licit” copy of FoxPro III (in those days on CDs and quite expensive); Dr. Newman had obtained it when at Air Products before SeaPharm and NCI. He exchanged it for copies of the reviews, as John could not find the necessary cash from his grants to buy a copy and thus was “condemned” to use FP II which was a real “problem child” to use! However, his first couple of NPR reviews were put together using that version.
John’s untimely death at 60 due to a congenital heart defect condition was a great loss. For all of us that were impacted by John, the travel award is a great way to honor his commitment to science. Both Dr. Chris Ireland and wife Ms. Mary Kay Harper worked/trained with John and were very close friends with him and his wife Meryl over the years. Whenever Dr. Newman was at the MNP meetings or at La Jolla for a variety of reasons, he and John would “catch-up” since they were friends who had similarities in various ways. Dr. Ireland relates, “In my opinion, John was the best pure chemist of his generation of natural products investigators.”
Dr. Chris Ireland, Ms. Mary Kay Harper, and Dr. David Newman
John was a pioneer in marine natural product chemistry and played a central role in developing the field of marine chemical ecology. He and his students discovered more than 300 novel compounds, many with complicated and unprecedented structures. John was a keen collaborator: these cooperative efforts resulted in significant findings about the role of natural products in basic cellular processes. John is perhaps best known for his 18 reviews of the marine natural product literature that are indispensable references for organic chemistry.
The American Society of Pharmacognosy honored John’s lifetime contributions to the study of natural products with the ASP Research Achievement Award in 2003. In tribute to John’s dedication as a mentor, the D. John Faulkner Award has been established to provide opportunity for a young investigator to attend an annual ASP meeting. Meryl Faulkner, John’s widow, initiated endowment of this award with the funds received from John’s ASP Research Achievement Award that she accepted on his behalf.
The award consists of an engraved plaque and $1,000 to assist the recipient to travel to an ASP annual meeting and present the results of her/his research. Applicants for the Travel Grant for Active Members who meet the selection criteria will automatically be considered for this award and need not submit a separate application but should include the initial date of their appointment in their letter. All awards are contingent on the acceptance of the paper for presentation by the Scientific Program Committee.
Application form requires:
- A short (2-3 pages) synopsis of the work to be presented
- curriculum vitae
- Letter of justification for the request.
Travel awards are granted to the applicant and may not be transferred to another listed in the abstract.