2019 National Fresenius Award to Kyle M. Lancaster

Kyle M. Lancaster of Cornell University has won the 2019 National Fresenius Award, an ACS National Award sponsored by Phi Lambda Upsilon. The Lancaster lab at Cornell has been exploring the chemistry underlying nitrification, the biological use of ammonia as fuel. Their key findings to date are that the obligate intermediate hydroxylamine is turned into the greenhouse agent nitrous oxide by an enzyme cytochrome P460, establishing a direct link between agriculture/land use and N2O emissions. They also effected a major revision in the nitrogen cycle to include nitric oxide as another obligate nitrification intermediate. Another heavy component of my program concerns spectroscopic interrogation of transition metal catalysts, with a focus on identifying and characterizing elusive intermediates such as carbenoid and nitrenoids as well as relating “unusual” electronic structures such as inverted ligand fields to reactivity.