The American Chemical Society has selected Scripps Research chemist Chi-Huey Wong for its 2027 Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry. Scripps announced the honor Friday, recognizing a La Jolla laboratory whose work uses carbohydrate chemistry to probe disease and help design medicines and vaccines.
The national award carries $5,000 and a certificate, with travel expenses available for the meeting where it will be presented. Wong and other ACS national award recipients are invited to a banquet during the society's spring meeting in New Orleans in March 2027.
Wong is the Scripps Family Chair Professor. His research centers on carbohydrates, including chains of sugars and the chemical processes that attach them to proteins. Those attachments can change a protein's structure and function, making them relevant to how cells communicate, how pathogens interact with hosts and how disease pathways can be targeted.
Bioorganic chemistry applies the tools and logic of organic chemistry to molecules and reactions in living systems. In Wong's lab, that includes developing ways to assemble carbohydrate-containing molecules that are difficult to produce consistently. Reliable synthesis lets researchers test a defined structure rather than work with a mixed biological sample whose components may behave differently.
Scripps links that foundational work to cancer and infectious-disease research. The award itself does not certify a particular drug or vaccine, and Friday's announcement did not report a new clinical result.
Instead, the honor recognizes a body of research and methods that can support later therapeutic development. It marks scientific contribution, not regulatory review, patient benefit or proof that any one candidate treatment works.
The ACS describes the Bader Award as honoring outstanding contributions to bioorganic or bioinorganic chemistry. It is supported by an endowed fund established in 1986 by Alfred and Isabel Bader. The society's eligibility criteria focus on research accomplishment, and the award is available to faculty, industry chemists and other chemistry professionals internationally.
Wong's record already spans several major chemistry honors. Scripps lists the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis, the ACS Arthur C. Cope Award, the Chemical Pioneer Award, the Royal Society of Chemistry's Robert Robinson Award and the Robert A. Welch Award. Yale's Kirkwood Medal was the most recent recognition before the Bader selection.
Awards compress long programs of work into a name and a ceremony. The scientific contribution is more distributed: synthetic methods, molecular targets, trainees, collaborations and experiments that can be reproduced by other laboratories. For carbohydrate research, where branching structures and small chemical differences can alter biological behavior, control over what is built is itself a significant tool.
The announcement arrives six months before the planned presentation. Until then, its local significance is institutional rather than clinical. A Scripps professor has been chosen for a national chemistry award; the award points to decades of work on complex sugars; and any health impact still depends on the separate, slower process of translating molecular insight into tested interventions. The ceremony will recognize completed achievements, while the compounds and techniques emerging from that work continue through their own evidence standards.