Assistant Professor Charles C. J. Loh
(opens in a new window)Assistant Professor Charles C. J. Loh of the UCD School of Chemistry has been named a winner of the 2025 Advanced Science Young Innovator Award, an international prize supported by Wiley (Advanced Science). The award recognises outstanding young researchers worldwide who are driving breakthroughs across disciplines.
This year, the selection process saw 472 candidates evaluated over multiple rounds by in-house editors and external judges. Only 11 awardees were chosen, representing leading institutions in the US, UK, Switzerland, Germany, China — and now Ireland, with Charles among them. Read more (opens in a new window)here.
Dr Loh is a pioneer in using “non-classical” σ-hole interactions such as halogen and chalcogen bonding to tackle major challenges in carbohydrate synthesis. His team is also developing innovative asymmetric catalytic strategies to solve long-standing problems of selectivity in carbohydrate chemistry. By combining noncovalent catalysis, asymmetric catalysis, mechanistic studies and computations, his group is breaking new ground in this emerging domain.
His research has earned international recognition, with keynote invitations to major conferences including the Gordon Research Conference (US), the International Conference of Noncovalent Interactions (Serbia), EuroCarb22 (Poland) and CARBO-XXXIX (India). He is also a recipient of the Liebig Fellowship from the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie and the prestigious Plus 3 Perspectives Programme from the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation.
Dr Loh completed his PhD at RWTH Aachen University in 2013 under Prof. Dieter Enders, followed by postdoctoral research with Prof. Mark Lautens at the University of Toronto. He led an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, Germany, from 2016 to 2024, before joining UCD as Assistant Professor of Synthetic Organic Chemistry in Autumn 2024.