In recognition of excellence demonstrated in the field of organic chemistry, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has awarded Keary Engle, PhD, Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and professor in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research, the 2025 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award.

The award is part of the ACS’s prestigious National Awards program and supported by an endowed fund established by Arthur C. Cope, an organic chemist credited with developing several classical chemical reactions, including the Cope Elimination and Cope Rearrangement. ACS National Awards recipients are nominated by their peers.

Engle is one of two chemists in the world to be honored in the award’s early-career category. As part of the award, he will receive $5,000, a certificate, and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant. He will be presented with the award during the ACS’s Fall meeting in Washington, D.C., from August 17–21, 2025.

Engle’s lab focuses on accelerating the synthesis of organic molecules that are used in medicines, biological probes, agrochemicals and materials building blocks. Many of these molecules are difficult to prepare, requiring several steps to create, costing a substantial amount of time and effort, and generating large quantities of waste. Engle’s lab is developing well-defined metal catalysts that enable efficient, effective and sustainable methods of chemical synthesis to better produce small molecules. Catalysts developed in the Engle lab have been rapidly adopted in academic and industrial labs around the world.

Prior to joining Scripps Research as an Assistant Professor in 2015, Engle was an NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He is also a recipient of the 2021 NSF CAREER Award, 2021 Amgen Young Investigator Award, 2020 Eli Lilly Organic Chemistry Award, and 2018 Bristol Myers Squibb Unrestricted Grant, among many other honors.

As part of the Skaggs-Oxford Scholarship program, Engle received doctorate degrees at Scripps Research and University of Oxford. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry, economics, mathematics, and statistics at University of Michigan.