David BlackProfessor David Black, School of Chemistry, University of New South Wales, Australia. Professor David Black studied chemistry at the University of Sydney. Following a Masters degree mentored by Francis Lions, he was awarded an Overseas Scholarship ofthe Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to undertake a PhD in Cambridge with Lord Todd. After post-doctoral research with Thomas Katz at Columbia University, he was appointed to a lectureship at Monash University. In 1983 he moved to the chair of organic chemistry at the University of New South Wales. He has spent periods of study leave at the ETH Zürich (with Albert Eschenmoser), Würzburg University as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (with Siegfried Hünig) and Cambridge University (with Alan Battersby). He has also held Visiting Professorships in Tokyo, Auckland, Göttingen, Innsbruck and Kobe. He has won the Rennie, Smith, Birch and Leighton Medals of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, of which he served as National President in 1998. David Black has also contributed to international science as Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry from 2004-2011, and Secretary General of the International Council for Science from 2011-2018. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Officer of the Order of Australia. He was recently awarded the 2017 Craig Medal of the Australian Academy of Science. Professor Black has made major contributions to organic chemistry in the general fields of heterocyclic chemistry, coordination chemistry and natural products. His research has focused on the design and synthesis of new molecular structural types, often related to important known natural products, but displaying deliberate reactivity variations that are not found in nature. He was a pioneer in the use of metal coordination for the control of organic reactions, and has also discovered new reactions of activated indoles leading to the construction of molecular receptors and small peptide mimics. Read More Read Less