Fraser Stoddart Age, Wife, Children, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Fraser Stoddart

• When he was born, he was very weak. The doctor had said that there was a 50% chance that he would live, but he survived.

• He grew up on Edgelaw Farm where he lived without electricity till the age of 18.

• During his teenage years, he worked at the farm with his father and used to look after the cows and sheep. He also used to fish at the lake on the farm.
  

  Fraser Stoddart fishing during his childhood days

• He took piano lessons during his school days but later stopped as could not learn according to his expectations. He later played hockey for his school team.
  

  Fraser Stoddart during his school days

• He did not belong to a rich family, yet his father bought him a Lambretta scooter when he got his driver’s licence after turning 16 in 1958.
  

  Fraser Stoddart riding his Lambretta scooter

• He met Norma Scholan while pursuing his PhD as she joined the Dr D M W Anderson group as a fourth-year undergraduate research student.

• Stoddart moved to Canada in 1967 to pursue further education.
  

  Fraser Stoddart during his college days

• His wife, Norma, moved to Canada after their marriage in 1968 where she pursued her PhD.

• He studied at Queen’s University in Canada as a postdoctoral fellow and at Sheffield University in England as an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) research fellow.

• He was once typing Norma’s PhD thesis when the coffee suddenly spilt on the pages. While Norma started crying and later slept after he comforted her, he remained awake for the whole night and retyped the thesis.

• After completing his academics, he joined Sheffield University as a lecturer of Chemistry.

• In 1978, he was a Science Research Council Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

• He was promoted to Readership at the Sheffield University in 1982.

• He moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at Birmingham University in 1990 and was appointed head of the School of Chemistry there.

• In February 1992, his wife Norma suffered a brain haemorrhage but her artery self-healed within a few days.
  

  Fraser Stoddart with his daughters and wife (right to left)

• As his wife, Norma, was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 1992 which became metastatic in 1996, he started looking for career opportunities in the USA for better medical facilities of treatment.

• In 1997, he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), succeeding Nobel Laureate Donald Cram. He taught students there till 2008.
  

  Fraser Stoddart experimenting in one of his labs

• In 2003, he became the Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and worked there till August 2007. In 2008, he moved to Northwestern University as a Board of Trustees Professor in Chemistry.
  

  Fraser Stoddart during a lecture

• The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) predicted him as the likely winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

• From January 1997 to August 2007, the Institute for Scientific Information ranked him as the 3rd most cited chemist.

• The University of Edinburgh established ‘The Fraser and Norma Stoddart Prize’ for PhD students which was given for the first time in 2013.
  

  Fraser Stoddart (left) giving ‘The Fraser and Norma Stoddart Prize’ to one of the recipients

• He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016 along with Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Bernard L. Feringa for their design and production of Molecular Machines. They have developed molecules with controllable movements and these molecules can perform a task when energy is added.
  

  Winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

• The then-US President Barack Obama met with Stoddart after he won the Nobel Prize to congratulate him.
  

  Fraser Stoddart, his daughters, Allison and Fiona, and Barack Obama (right to left)

• Many other organisations ranked him as one of the best immigrant scientists in the USA.

• In November 2019, he launched his skincare brand Noble Panacea which included day cream, eye cream, night cream, and serum.
  

  Products of Fraser Stoddart’s skincare brand, Noble Panacea

• In 2021, he co-founded a startup H2MOF with Omar Yaghi and Sameer Taha which works in the field of hydrogen storage.
  

  Sameer Taha, Fraser Stoddart, and Omar Yaghi, (left to right) co-founders of H2MOF

• As of 2022, James Fraser Stoddart has an h-index of 175.

• Stoddart has trained nearly 450 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers during 35 years in his laboratories.
  

  Fraser Stoddart working in the laboratory with his PhD students

• He is known for using Nanomechanical Systems by using Mechanically-Interlocked Molecular Architectures.

• Stoddart has been credited for making molecular machines attractive to chemists.

• His papers and other presentation materials are easily recognized due to his distinctive cartoon style of representation which he has developed since the late 1980s.

• Fraser holds around 20 patents and has published more than 1100 publications.

• His work in Chemistry has changed the way chemists think about Molecular Switches and Machines.

• His daughters are also graduates in Chemistry with First Class Honours degrees. His elder daughter, Fiona, has done her graduation at Imperial College London, and his younger daughter, Alison, has done it at the University of Cambridge.
  

  Fraser Stoddart with his daughters, Fiona (left) and Alison

• He likes to drink wine during parties.
  

  Fraser Stoddart (middle) holding a glass of wine