Professor Geoffery Coates, Assistant Professor Yimon Aye and student Shivansh Chawla ’17, who works in Aye’s lab in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, were all recently honored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) with 2016 awards.

Coates won the Kathryn C. Hach Award for Entrepreneurial Success, along with Scott Allen and Anthony Eisenhut, for founding the company Novomer. Aye was named this year’s recipient of the Chemical Research in Toxicology Young Investigator Award and Chawla won an ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship of $5,000 to fund his research this summer.

The Hach award that Coates received recognizes “outstanding entrepreneurs who have created a commercially viable business within the chemical enterprise.” Novomer is an Ithaca company commercializing a family of sustainable high-performance polymers and chemicals synthesized from waste gases such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

Aye’s lab focuses on chemistry-driven methods development in chemical biology, with the goals to understand biochemistry and cellular biology of electrophile signaling pathways and molecular regulation of redox-sensitive and electrophile-responsive proteins of importance in human pathophysiology. Chawla is a member of that lab. His summer research grant is one of only 14 given out by ACS to outstanding undergraduate organic chemistry students.