Sir James Fraser Stoddart: Nobel prize-winning chemist who lectured at Sheffield University dead at 82

He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on the world’s smallest molecular machines.

He left Sheffield in 1990 to take up a position at Birmingham University before moving to the USA, where he became professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois.

He was given the Nobel honour alongside Jean-Pierre Sauvage, of the University of Strasbourg, and Ben L Feringa, of the University of Groningen, for their design and synthesis of molecular machines a thousand times thinner than a strand of hair.

The work conducted by Stoddart and his Sheffield research group in 1991 was praised in the Nobel citation for enabling the field of molecular machinery to take a “big leap forward”. Stoddart was a dedicated mentor to countless young scientists and a passionate advocate for scientific research and education.

He remained connected with Sheffield University throughout his life, most recently visiting chemistry students and researchers in 2018.

His career saw him accumulate many awards including the Royal Medal, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Century Prize. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Sheffield in 2008, having published 1,080 scientific papers and trained more than 500 graduate and postdoctoral students.

Stoddart was born in 1942 near Edinburgh and grew up in a small farming community.

He obtained a bachelor’s degree and doctorate in chemistry from Edinburgh University, where he met his future wife, the biochemist Norma Scholan. They had two daughters and she became a key part of his research group. She died in 2004. In later life, Stoddart became a noted art collector and occasional political commentator.