Nobel Prize winner has local roots

A UC Irvine alumnus has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for development of a new tool to build molecules using organic catalysts. The work of David MacMillan, a Princeton professor and former Caltech scientist, has spurred advances in pharmaceutical research with considerably less impact on the environment, according to the Royal Academy of Swedish Scientists, which awards the Nobel Prize. MacMillan earned his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at UCI in 1996. He shares the prize with Benjamin List of Scripps Research, who independently made the same discovery.