Gellman to receive American Chemical Society award

Andrew Gellman, Lord Professor of chemical engineering, will receive the 2026 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Surface Chemistry.

The award recognizes distinguished services in the advancement of surface chemistry. Gellman will be honored at an award ceremony March 24, 2026, in conjunction with ACS Spring 2026 in Atlanta. The ACS Award in Surface Chemistry is sponsored by Procter & Gamble.

The citation for Gellman's award reads: "For discovery of naturally chiral metal surfaces and pioneering studies of their structure and enantioselective surface chemistry."

Gellman's groundbreaking 1996 paper demonstrated that metals can have chiral surfaces, despite their achiral bulk structures. "This is the first time this was understood, and this simple revelation spawned efforts worldwide to examine and exploit the enantiospecific properties of intrinsically chiral surfaces," says John Kitchin, professor of chemical engineering.

Chiral molecules are mirror images of one another, but like a pair of hands, they are not superimposable. Even though they are chemically identical, left- or right-handed molecules, also known as enantiomers, interact with other molecules differently. In living organisms, one enantiomer may have a therapeutic effect, while the other may be toxic. The pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, among others, need purified chemicals that are formed of only one enantiomer.

"Professor Gellman's discovery of chiral catalysis on metals opened the door to using chiral metal surfaces for synthesis and separation," says Kitchin. Gellman's continued innovations include the development and application of high-throughput methods for studying alloy surface properties such as catalysis.

For media inquiries, please contact Lauren Smith at lsmith2@andrew.cmu.edu.