Bruce Ganem, the Franz and Elisabeth Roessler Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Chemistry Department at Cornell, has received the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The award, which includes a $25,000 unrestricted research grant, recognizes and encourages excellence in organic chemistry.

"Ganem was among the first researchers to explore the point where chemistry and biology meet," according to the ACS. His achievements include research on the synthesis of complex natural products using new techniques in organic and organometallic chemistry and studies on the chemical pathways that plants and microorganisms use in biosynthesizing important metabolic intermediates.

In other work, Ganem and his students have developed new ways to design molecular probes for examining the structure and function of enzymes and to analyze macromolecular complexes of biological interest. In collaboration with Alex Winter, Cornell professor emeritus of veterinary medicine, he has studied new chemical approaches to establishing immune responses.

Ganem earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard College in 1969 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Columbia University in 1972. He then spent a year as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University before joining the Cornell faculty in 1974. He has been department chair since 1993.

Ganem has published more than 180 scientific papers and holds two patents. His previous honors include both the J.S. Guggenheim and A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowships, the American Cyanamid Award for the Advancement of the Art and Science of Chemical Synthesis and the John M. and Emily B. Clark Distinguished Teaching Award in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences.