David MacMillan

Sir David William Cross MacMillan (born 16 March 1968) is a Scottish chemist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, where he was also the chair of the Department of Chemistry from 2010 to 2015. He is also a Distinguished Scholar at the Princeton Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Benjamin List "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis". MacMillan used his share of the $1.14 million prize to establish the May and Billy MacMillan Foundation.

Education and early life MacMillan was born in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1968 and grew up in nearby New Stevenston. He attended the local state-funded schools, New Stevenston Primary and Bellshill Academy, and credited his Scottish education and Scottish upbringing for his success.

He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Glasgow, where he worked with Ernie Colvin.

In 1990, he left the UK to begin his doctoral studies under the direction of Professor Larry Overman at the University of California, Irvine. During this time, he focused on the development of new reaction methodology directed toward the stereocontrolled formation of bicyclic tetrahydrofurans. MacMillan's graduate studies culminated in the total synthesis of acetate, a eunicellin diterpenoid isolated from the soft coral Eunicella stricta. He earned his Ph.D. in 1996. MacMillan's research group has made many advances in the field of asymmetric organocatalysis, and they have applied these new methods to the synthesis of a range of complex natural products. are used in various asymmetric syntheses. Examples include Diels-Alder reactions, Friedel-Crafts alkylations or Michael additions.

In the early 2020s, MacMillan expanded his research into chemical biology, including the development of µMap, a photocatalytic proximity-labeling platform that enables the mapping of molecular interactions at nanometer-scale resolution. The technology subsequently became a focus of his laboratory's research into biological systems, including cancer biology, and in 2025 he was appointed a Distinguished Scholar of the Princeton Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. and of 115 according to Scopus.

Honours and awards MacMillan was knighted in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to chemistry and science.

2002 – Sloan Research Fellowship 2004 – Corday-Morgan medal of Royal Institute of Chemistry 2012 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) 2012 – Elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2013 – Elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) 2015 – Harrison Howe Award 2015 – Ernst Schering Prize 2017 – Ryoji Noyori Prize 2018 – Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences

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