Last week the 2010 Nobel prizes were announced and we sifted through the entries of our Guess-a-Nobel contest to find winners. Turns out only one person was able to name a new Nobel laureate. Odessa Marks out of North Carolina State University guessed that principal scientists working on palladium-catalyzed cross couplings would be getting the Chemistry Nobel.
Odessa was traveling earlier this week, so our apologies for the delay in the announcement. We asked Odessa to tell us a bit about herself:
Inspired by her grandmother Mavis to become a scientist, Odessa Marks is a graduate student with the Comparative Biomedical Sciences Program at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine, in Raleigh, North Carolina. She works in the laboratory of Dr. Jorge Piedrahita developing transgenic pigs to model human diseases. As President of the Graduate Student Association, she also ran NCSU’s inaugural Predict-A-Laureate Contest, similar to Medgadget’s!
Odessa chose this year’s Chemistry Laureates because, “It just seemed like palladium catalysis was used in organic synthesis all the time, and everywhere I looked, I saw people talking about how the palladium chemists were long overdue to win. So I thought maybe this would be the year!”
“Thank you to Medgadget for the prize, for running such a fun contest, and for raising discussion and excitement in the sciences during Nobel season!”
Thank you Odessa, and hope you enjoy your new iPod nano.