Professor Tehshik P. Yoon has been named the recipient of the 2026 David A. Evans Award for the Advancement and Education of Organic Synthesis, one of the 2026 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Awards. He will be honored at a ceremony at ACS Spring 2026 in Atlanta on March 24, 2026. According to the citation from the ACS, Yoon received the award for “trailblazing and comprehensive contributions to stereocontrolled photochemistry and paragon-level contributions to teaching, mentoring, and community building.”
Yoon received an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University, and it was David Evans who inspired Yoon to become a scientist. “It was Dave Evans, without a doubt,” explains Yoon. “I knew I liked learning about chemistry from my introductory undergraduate courses. Dave gave me my first opportunity to actually do chemistry in the laboratory. And what an environment that was. I was surrounded every day by the most ambitious and talented organic chemists I could imagine. From my first moment in his lab, I knew I had to become a synthetic chemist.” After undergraduate studies, Yoon received an M.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry from California Institute of Technology.
Now at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the central goal of research in the Yoon Group is to develop strategies for the controlled synthesis of complex organic molecules, with particular interest in photochemical synthesis because of the distinctive reactivity available from excited-state compounds. The group aims to control the stereoselectivity, chemoselectivity, and regioselectivity of complex photoreactions requiring the development of new catalytic principles for modulating the reactivity of high-energy reactive intermediates. The resulting methods have applications in total synthesis and pharmaceutical chemistry.
According to Thorsten Bach of the Technical University of Munich, Yoon takes this research on with creativity and precision. “The field of photoredox catalysis as we know it today would not be conceivable without the creative work of Tehshik. Beyond his outstanding scientific achievements, he has maintained an equally high standard in presenting his work to the chemical community.”
The David A. Evans Award for the Advancement and Education of Organic Synthesis is endowed by a fund established by Amgen, Eli Lilly and Company, Merck & Co., and friends and colleagues of David A. Evans.