A winner has been announced for the prestigious Tetrahedron Prize 2003.

The Executive Board of Tetrahedron Publications has announced that this year's Prize has been awarded jointly to Professor Robert Grubbs and Professor Dieter Seebach.

Each Professor will receive a gold medal and $5,000. The Tetrahedron Prize Symposium will be jointly held in their honour at the ACS Fall Meeting in Philadelphia this August.

Professor Grubbs is the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech).

Grubbs and his group carry out research in the design, synthesis and mechanistic studies of complexes that catalyse useful organic transformations.

In the course of their research they created 'Grubbs catalyst' - a ruthenium-based catalyst now in its second generation - that has resulted in significant developments in olefin metathesis and the production of new families of polymeric material.

Professor Seebach, meanwhile, works in the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at ETH Zurich.

Seebach and his group and are currently involved in the development of new synthetic methods, natural product synthesis, mechanistic studies and structure determination.

The current focus of research by the group is on the synthesis of enantiopure compounds with TADDOL auxiliaries, chiral dendrimers and beta-peptides.