Simmons, 64, will receive the medal at the national ACS meeting in San Diego this month. Being presented with the award caught Simmons by surprise. "The Priestley Medal hasn't been given very often to industrial people. I wasn't anticipating it," he says.
In the award announcement, ACS explains that Simmons "is being recognized for his many years of distinguished service to chemical science, industry, and society."
Simmons is primarily known for two areas of research. "The piece of work that I'm best known for is the Simmons-Smith reaction," he says. This synthetic reaction, which bears Simmons's name as well as that of Ronald Smith, a research chemist at DuPont in the late 1950s, was the first addition of the hydrocarbon fragment, methylene, to a double bond, thus converting simple olefins (also known as alkenes) to cyclopropanes (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 80:5323, 1958 and 81:4245, 1959). "At the time ...
