Wolf Prize in Chemistry

The Wolf Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics and Arts.

The Wolf Prize in Chemistry is considered to be one of the most prestigious international chemistry awards, behind only the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.^[1] Becoming a Wolf Prize laureate has been viewed as a potential precursor to receiving the Nobel Prize.^[2] As of 2022, 12 awardees have subsequently become Nobel laureates; the most recent of those is Carolyn Bertozzi, who received the Nobel Prize the same year.

Laureates[3]

Year	Name	Nationality	Citation
1978	Carl Djerassi	Austria	for his work in bioorganic chemistry, application of new spectroscopic techniques, and his support of international cooperation.
1979	Herman Mark	Austria	for his contributions to understanding the structure and behavior of natural and synthetic polymers.
1980	Henry Eyring	Mexico	for his development of absolute rate theory and its imaginative applications to chemical and physical processes.
1981	Joseph Chatt	United Kingdom	for pioneering and fundamental contributions to synthetic transition metal chemistry, particularly transition metal hydrides and dinitrogen complexes.
1982	John Charles Polanyi	Hungary /  Canada	for his studies of chemical reactions in unprecedented detail by developing the infrared chemiluminescence technique, and for envisaging the chemical laser.
	George C. Pimentel	United States	for development of matrix isolation spectroscopy and for the discovery of photodissociation lasers and chemical lasers.
1983/4	Herbert S. Gutowsky	United States	for his pioneering work in the development and applications of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in chemistry.
	Harden M. McConnell	United States	for his studies of the electronic structure of molecules through paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and for the introduction and biological applications of spin label techniques.
	John S. Waugh	United States	for his fundamental theoretical and experimental contributions to high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in solids.
1984/5	Rudolph A. Marcus	Canada /  United States	for his contributions to chemical kinetics, especially the theories of unimolecular reactions and electron transfer reactions.
1986	Elias James Corey	United States	for outstanding research on the synthesis of many highly complex natural products and the demonstration of novel ways of thinking about such syntheses.
	Albert Eschenmoser	Switzerland	for outstanding research on the synthesis, stereochemistry and reaction mechanisms for formation of natural products, especially Vitamin-B12.
1987	David C. Phillips David M. Blow	United Kingdom  United Kingdom	for their contributions to protein X-ray crystallography and to the elucidation of structures of enzymes and their mechanisms of action.
1988	Joshua Jortner Raphael David Levine	Israel  Israel	for their incisive theoretical studies elucidating energy acquisition and disposal in molecular systems and mechanisms for dynamical selectivity and specificity.
1989	Duilio Arigoni Alan R. Battersby	Switzerland  United Kingdom	for their fundamental contributions to the elucidation of the mechanism of enzymic reactions and of the biosynthesis of natural products, in particular the pigments of life.
1990	No award
1991	Richard R. Ernst	Switzerland	for his revolutionary contributions to NMR spectroscopy, especially Fourier-transform and two-dimensional NMR
	Alexander Pines	Rhodesia /  United States	for his revolutionary contributions to NMR spectroscopy, especially multiple-quantum and high-spin NMR.
1992	John Pople	United Kingdom	for his outstanding contributions to theoretical chemistry, particularly in developing effective and widely used modern quantum- chemical methods.
1993	Ahmed Hassan Zewail	Egypt /  United States	for pioneering the development of laser femtochemistry. Using lasers and molecular beams, femtochemistry has made it now possible to probe the evolution of chemical reactions as they actually happen in real time.
1994/5	Richard Lerner Peter Schultz	United States  United States	for developing catalytic antibodies, thus permitting the catalysis of chemical reactions considered impossible to achieve by classical chemical procedures.
1995/6	Gilbert Stork Samuel J. Danishefsky	United States  United States	for designing and developing novel chemical reactions which have opened new avenues to the synthesis of complex molecules, particularly polysaccharides and many other biologically and medicinally important compounds.
1996/7	No award
1998	Gerhard Ertl Gabor A. Somorjai	Germany;  Hungary  United States	for their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general, and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surfaces in particular.
1999	Raymond U. Lemieux	Canada	for his fundamental and seminal contributions to the study and synthesis of oligosaccharides and to the elucidation of their role in molecular recognition in biological systems.
2000	Frank Albert Cotton	United States	for opening up an entirely new phase of transition metal chemistry based on pairs and clusters of metal atoms directly linked by single or multiple bonds.
2001	Henri B. Kagan Ryōji Noyori K. Barry Sharpless	France  Japan  United States	for their pioneering, creative and crucial work in developing asymmetric catalysis for the synthesis of chiral molecules, greatly increasing mankind's ability to create new products of fundamental and practical importance.
2002/3	No award
2004	Harry B. Gray	United States	for pioneering work in bio-inorganic chemistry, unravelling novel principles of structure and long-range electron transfer in proteins.
2005	Richard N. Zare	United States	for his ingenious applications of laser techniques, for identifying complex mechanisms in molecules, and their use in analytical chemistry.
2006/7	Ada Yonath George Feher	Israel  United States  Hungary	for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis.
2008	William E. Moerner Allen J. Bard	United States  United States	for the ingenious creation of a new field of science, single molecule spectroscopy and electrochemistry, with impact at the nanoscopic regime, from the molecular and cellular domain to complex material systems.
2009	No award
2010	No award
2011	Stuart A. Rice Ching W. Tang Krzysztof Matyjaszewski	United States;  United States;  Poland /  United States	for the deep creative contributions to the chemical sciences in the field of synthesis, properties and an understanding of organic materials.
2012	A. Paul Alivisatos	United States	for his development of the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience and for making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties.[4]
	Charles M. Lieber	United States	for his seminal contributions to nanochemistry and particularly the synthesis of single-crystalline semiconductor nanowires, characterization of the fundamental physical properties of nanowires, and their application to electronics, photonics and nanomedicine.[5]
2013	Robert S. Langer	United States	for conceiving and implementing advances in polymer chemistry that provide both controlled drug-release systems and new biomaterials.
2014	Chi-Huey Wong	Taiwan /  United States	for his numerous and original contributions to the development of innovative methods for the programmable and applied synthesis of complex oligosaccharides and glycol-proteins.
2015	No award
2016	Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou	Cyprus /  United States	for advancing the field of chemical synthesis to the extremes of molecular complexity, linking structure and function and expanding our dominion over the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine.
	Stuart Schreiber	United States	for pioneering chemical insights into the logic of signal transduction and gene regulation that led to important, new therapeutics and for advancing chemical biology and medicine through the discovery of small-molecule probes.
2017	Robert G. Bergman	United States	for his discovery of the activation responses of carbon-hydrogen bonds in hydrocarbons by soluble organometallic complexes.
2018	Omar M. Yaghi	Jordan /  United States	for pioneering reticular chemistry via metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs).
	Makoto Fujita	Japan	for conceiving metal-directed assembly principles leading to large highly porous complexes.[6]
2019	Stephen L. Buchwald John F. Hartwig	United States  United States	for pioneering the development of transition metal catalyzed procedures that are broadly applicable and allow carbon-heteroatom bonds of all sorts to be formed with previously unknown efficiency and precision.[7]
2020	No award
2021	Leslie Leiserowitz Meir Lahav	Israel  Israel	for collaboratively established the fundamental reciprocal influences of three-dimensional molecular structure upon structures of organic crystals.[8]
2022	Bonnie L. Bassler Carolyn R. Bertozzi Benjamin F. Cravatt	United States  United States  United States	for their seminal contributions to understanding the chemistry of cellular communication and inventing chemical methodologies to study the role of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins in such biological processes.[9]
2023	Chuan He Hiroaki Suga Jeffery W. Kelly	United States  Japan  United States	for pioneering discoveries that illuminate the functions and pathological dysfunctions of RNA and proteins and for creating strategies to harness the capabilities of these biopolymers in new ways to ameliorate human diseases.[10]
2024	No award
2025	Helmut F. Schwarz	Germany	for quantifying reactive species in the gas phase to solve fundamental problems in catalysis.[11][12]

Laureates per country

Below is a chart of all laureates per country (updated to 2025 laureates). Some laureates are counted more than once if they have multiple citizenships.

Country	Number of laureates
United States	38
United Kingdom	5
Israel	5
Hungary	3
Canada	3
Switzerland	3
Japan	3
Austria	2
Germany	2
Mexico	1
Egypt	1
France	1
Poland	1
Rhodesia	1
Taiwan	1
Jordan	1
Cyprus	1

See also

• List of chemistry awards