Dr. Margaret Faul Women in Chemistry Awards

• Each prize is awarded to a young woman of any nationality within the first 15 years of her independent career in chemical research.
• The prizes will be awarded in recognition of the candidates’ outstanding achievements in organic chemistry, broadly defined to include medicinal, biological, organometallic, or materials chemistry, and related areas.

Proposals must be accompanied by:

• a resume or CV of the nominee
• a list of the candidate’s most significant publications (up to 10)
• a statement describing the candidate’s work and its importance (up to 3 pages)
• a short citation summarizing the candidate’s achievements (1-2 sentences)

The material will be confidentially forwarded to an independent selection committee. Self-nomination is not permitted.

Scientific excellence, as stipulated in the General Principles, applies to both the Dr. Margaret Faul Women in Chemistry Award 2027 and the Dr. Margaret Faul Women in the Chemical Industry Award 2027.

Selection Committee Chairs:

• Dr. Margaret Faul: Amgen Inc. | CA, USA
• Prof. Cristina Nevado: University of Zurich | Switzerland

Deadline:
11 December, 2026; Nomination materials should be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Marcus White (E-mail).

Prize Ceremony:
The The prize ceremony will take place at the European Symposium on Organic Chemistry (ESOC) in Bologna (Italy) in 2027; details of the venue and date will be announced in autumn 2026. 

Both awardees will be expected to give a lecture on their work following the prize ceremony.

Thieme and the Editors of Science of Synthesis are delighted to announce the Dr. Margaret Faul Women in Chemistry Award Winners 2025. This year, for the first time, the award selection committee selected one candidate from academia and one candidate from industry to receive the Women in Chemistry Award.

Prof. Franziska Schoenebeck (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and Dr. Dani Schultz (Merck & Co., NJ, USA) were elected to be the 2025 recipients of the awards in recognition of the outstanding creativity and ingenuity of their research in addition to their broader contributions to synthetic organic chemistry.

Both awards will be presented to the winners at the European Symposium on Organic Chemistry (ESOC) in Copenhagen, Denmark, taking place from June 29 to July 3, 2025.

Learn more about ESOC.

Franziska Schoenebeck obtained her PhD from the University of Strathclyde (UK) and then spent time as a Research Fellow at UCLA (USA) before joining the faculty of the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) as Assistant Professor in 2010. In 2013 she moved to her current institution, RWTH Aachen University (Germany), achieving promotion to full Professor in 2016.

Franziska Schoenebeck has made leading contributions to the fields of organic synthesis and computational mechanistic chemistry, covering a diverse range of subjects such as the use of organogermanes in synthesis and catalysis, the development of efficient methods for the trifluoromethylation of nitrogen groups, and the application of machine learning in the study and development of dinuclear metal complex catalysts.

Learn more about her research.

Dani Schultz obtained her PhD from the University of Michigan (USA), and then was awarded an NIH postdoctoral fellowship to work in the laboratories of Prof. Tehshik Yoon at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA). Dani joined the Process Chemistry group at Merck in Rahway, NJ (USA) in 2014, and she currently holds the position of Director of the Discovery Process Chemistry team.

Dani Schultz is a highly accomplished scientist who has demonstrated leadership, creativity, and ingenuity in her academic and professional career, driving science and culture at Merck and in the broader chemical community. She has influenced the field through the development of new modalities and their rapid translation into the clinic as well as the development of new synthetic methods through leadership in numerous academic collaborations.

Learn more about her research.