Caltech will have a brand-new theoretical chemistry centre named after chemistry Nobel laureate Rudy Marcus, who just turned 101 years old, thanks to a $30 million (£23.3 million) gift from a husband and wife team who were postdocs at the university. A Canadian-born American chemist, Marcus won the 1992 chemistry Nobel prize for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems.
The philanthropic contribution from Yongfeng Zhang and Mary Zi-ping, announced on 22 July, pays tribute to their lifelong mentor and friend. Zhang is president, chief executive, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Amphastar Pharmaceuticals – a biopharmaceutical company based in California – and was Marcus’s postdoc 36 years ago. Luo, who was also a Caltech postdoc, serves as the company’s chief operating officer, chief scientist and co-founder.
The goal of their gift is to bolster Caltech’s chemistry department with new graduate fellowships that are named in honour of both of their parents.
‘Jack and Mary’s generous gift speaks powerfully to our highest aspirations,’ stated Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum. ‘It highlights the lifelong connections forged among scholars and mentors at the institute, while opening doors for following generations of students, postdocs and faculty members at the leading edge of theoretical chemistry research.’
In 1988, Zhang and Luo met at Caltech when he was in Marcus’s lab and she was already at the university working as a theoretical chemistry postdoc with the late Vince McKoy. They later learned, however, that they had been in the same room years earlier as two of the nine out of more than 200 candidates who qualified for the quantum chemistry entrance examination for graduate schools in China after the country resumed testing following the Cultural Revolution.
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