Laura L. Kiessling and Ronald T. Raines Named van ’t Hoff Lectureship Award Recipients
This prestigious award is named for the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Laura L. Kiessling, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry, and Ronald T. Raines, the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry, have been awarded the 2026 van ’t Hoff Lectureship Award from the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) in the Netherlands. Established in 1957 in memory of Dutch chemist Jacobus Henricus van ’t Hoff—the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, honored in 1901—the award recognizes leading scientists for their innovative chemistry research.
Kiessling and Raines received the award at a ceremony held during the 2026 van ’t Hoff Symposium on Chirality on June 4 at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chirality, an essential aspect of life, is the property of an object being non-superimposable on its mirror image. This phenomenon occurs at both the macroscopic and the molecular levels, and its molecular basis was first explained by van ’t Hoff, whose tetrahedral model of carbon laid the foundation of stereochemistry.
During the symposium, Kiessling and Raines joined a group of international scientists to present the latest developments in chirality in all its forms. Kiessling, whose research uses chemical biology to elucidate the biological roles of carbohydrates with a focus on uncovering new mechanistic concepts, presented her findings on stereochemistry and carbohydrate recognition. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is also a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among her many honors are the Society for Glycobiology’s Karl Meyer Lectureship Award, the American Chemical Society’s Willard Gibbs Award and Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize, and the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry.
Raines, whose research employs techniques ranging from synthetic chemistry to cell biology to illuminate the chemical basis and biological purpose of protein structure and function, presented his work on stereoelectronic effects on protein structure. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Raines is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Biology, and the National Academy of Inventors. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the AstraZeneca Protein and Peptide Science Award, the American Chemical Society’s Ralph F. Hirschmann Award, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Khorana Prize and Jeremy Knowles Award, the American Peptide Society’s Vincent du Vigneaud Award, the Protein Society’s Emil Thomas Kaiser Award, the Humboldt Research Award, the Max Bergmann Medal, and MIT’s Undergraduate Teaching Prize.
