By Steph Yiu

The Daily Northwestern

In a lilting Scottish accent, Professor Fraser Stoddart launches into the tale of how he became a knight.

“I’m only a few seconds away from meeting Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II,” he says in well-rehearsed verse. “The Lord Chamberlain said: ‘May I present to Your Majesty, Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart, for Services to Chemistry and Molecular Nanotology.'”

Nanotology?

“Yes, nanotology,” he affirms. “In my head, I think, ‘Do I ignore this? How is this going to work out?'”

Stoddart tells the story in his lectures. The Queen, at 5 feet 4, is tiny. He’s kneeling. And there’s a big sword perched on his right shoulder.

Then the Queen says, “He got that wrong, didn’t he?”

“He certainly did, your majesty.”

“What should it be then, nanotechnology?”

The Queen dealt with it impressively, he says. And it makes a nice story.

Stoddart, 65, said he has received more awards since the ceremony, held last winter, than in the previous 60 years.

Listed as the third-most cited scientist in chemistry by Thomson Scientific, there is no question that Stoddart is a nanotech powerhouse. In a move announced Aug. 16, he will be coming to Evanston this year thanks to Northwestern staging what the Chicago Sun-Times called a “chemistry coup.” Stoddart will direct NU’s new Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems, an interdisciplinary center that focuses on science and engineering involving complex systems.

Stoddart and his research group will be leaving their warm-weather home at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Stoddart is best known for introducing the mechanical bond back in 1988, which created a new field of organic chemistry. Today he’s pioneering research that will lead to the development of molecular computers. In January, Stoddart’s lab created an extremely dense memory circuit that is the diameter of a white blood cell and holds 160,000 bits of memory. Stoddart said the creation is 13 years ahead of its time, and he’ll continue the research at NU.

“I’m as thrilled today as when I set out on the journey,” he said. “I’m a little boy with a whole new set of toys in great abundance (at NU). They’re the best the world can provide me with at this time.”

As he likes to tell it, Stoddart was born in a “little land named Scotland where one knew his way around by the age of 12.” Wanting to leave, he led a nomadic life, traveling all over the world in pursuit of better science.

This summer he returned to The University of Edinburgh, where he had received his Ph.D., to attend a symposium thrown in honor of his 65th birthday, titled: “The Young(-ish!) Giants of Chemistry.” A good plate of his favorite potatoes, Scottish lamb and haggis was in order.

Many of his “surrogate sons and daughters,” or former graduate and post-doctoral students, as well as friends and colleagues, traveled from all over the world to celebrate. Among the many presents he received at this party of “giants” was a tiny gift from NU Prof. Chad Mirkin, the director of NU’s International Institute for Nanotechnology. It was a portrait of Stoddart himself, one molecule high, made with a Dip-Pen Nanolithography technique invented by the Mirkin labs.

Events with Stoddart draw people from all over the world, in part because of the influence he has had on his former students, who near 300 in number. Early in life, Stoddart said he resolved to never treat younger students as poorly as he had been treated.

“In my early period as an assistant professor in a hierarchical program, I remember being called into the office of the professor who ran the department,” Stoddart said. “He clearly felt threatened by what I was doing and achieving. He just turned to me and said, ‘It is my mission to destroy you.'”

“I’m someone who remembers the downside of being a young person,” he said. “I decided it as unprincipled to be rejected.”

Stoddart has stuck to his word, according to third-year graduate student Travis Gasa.

“Fraser listens to what you have to say, and likes you to do what you want to do, research-wise,” Gasa said.

Gasa is the lab’s first “scout,” coming to Northwestern from UCLA earlier this month. He’ll be followed by the “pioneers” until the whole lab comes in January. Stoddart’s new lab in the Technological Institute’s K Wing will consist of new students and approximately 20 people who will follow him from UCLA.

“When I first met him,” Gasa said, “he took over an hour to talk to me about his research, when all I had heard about him from everyone at UCLA was that he was a very busy person.”

Starting his day at 5 or 6 a.m., Stoddart doesn’t leave his office until dinner, traveling once or twice a week and attending as many of his lab’s research meetings, which they call “group therapies,” as he can.

“Do today what has to be done, and not put it off till tomorrow,” Stoddart said.

It’s a mindset that settled in after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Our frequency of publishing doubled overnight as a result of hearing that life was no longer an infinite journey,” he said.

His wife, Norma, passed away in 2004 after battling cancer for 12 years.

When he arrives at NU, he hopes to cut back on the traveling and spend time getting comfortable. It’s going to be a different experience than one of the first times he drove into Chicago in 1968 with a few friends in a broken-down Ford Falcon.

“I’ve found a place to live,” he said. Stoddart chose the first home he visited. “I will be quite close, on a street I like to call ‘No, Yes’ street. Noyes Street.”

In the dead of winter this January, the lab will have settled in. And Stoddart, now at retirement age, sees no signs of quitting.

“I see no reason why I should stop,” he said, almost stubbornly. “Composers and conductors will go on well beyond their retirement age. Why should scientists be kicked out and put out to grass in their mid-sixties?”

Reach Steph Yiu at [email protected].