The 2025 Harrison Howe Awardee

The Rochester Local Section of the American Chemical Society is excited to announce that Professor Michelle Arkin has been selected as the 2025 Harrison Howe Award winner.

Linus Pauling, in his inaugural Harrison Howe lecture in 1946, stated “I am convinced that progress in our attack against disease, in our better understanding of the human body, of bacteria, viruses, and other vectors of disease, and of their interactions with each other depends on a better understanding of intermolecular forces and interactions.” This year, we honor the 71st recipient of the Harrison Howe Award, Prof. Michelle Arkin, who has led multiple research teams to tackle this challenging problem that Pauling identified in the very earliest decades of biochemical research.

Throughout her career, Prof. Arkin has led collaborative teams to develop new small-molecule drugs that target important human diseases by inhibiting and, in some cases, enhancing protein-protein interactions. In particular, she has spearheaded the development of a variety of biochemical methods that allow for the identification of functional and allosteric sites in proteins that are important for human health but previously deemed “undruggable”. By developing drugs that modulate a huge variety of protein-protein interactions, Prof. Arkin’s work has allowed great strides in our understanding and treatment of disease. Her research has opened up huge new areas of Pharmaceutical Chemistry that will lead to decades of development of medicines to treat a variety of diseases. Her collaborative research programs exemplify Harrison Howe’s commitment to the value of both academic and industrial research and development to benefit humanity.

Prof. Arkin will present a public lecture and receive the Harrison Howe award at a symposium at the University of Rochester on September 30, 2025. The lecture will begin at 7:30 pm in Goergen Hall, room 101, and a reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public. All members of the Rochester community, especially those involved in the chemistry enterprise, are invited to attend.

The Harrison Howe Award is dedicated to the memory of Harrison E. Howe, 1881-1942, a cofounder of the ACS Rochester Section and a well-known chemist, editor, and author. The award was established to recognize a scientist who has made outstanding contributions to chemistry or closely related fields and who shows great potential for further achievement. Recent winners of the award include Laura Kiessling (2005), Daniel Nocera (2008), Carolyn Bertozzi (2009), Joseph DeSimone (2011), X. Sunney Xie (2012), David MacMilan (2015), Chad Mirkin (2018), and Wilfred Van der Donk (2022).

For more information about the Harrison Howe Award lecture and event, and to register to present a poster, please contact Lynda McGarry, Development Administrator, at the University of Rochester.