Cathleen Crudden

Crudden earned a Bachelors of Science at the University of Toronto in 1989, working with Mark Lautens, with whom she went on to complete her master's degree.[2] She moved to University of Ottawa for her PhD, working under the supervision of Howard Alper, which she completed in 1995.[3]

Crudden was appointed a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council postdoctoral fellow at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign working with Scott E. Denmark in 1995.[2] She moved to University of New Brunswick in 1996 where she started her own research group.[4] In 2002, she was appointed a Queen's National Scholar and moved her research lab to Kingston, Ontario.

Crudden was the first to identify an enantiospecific Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reaction of chiral boranes.[5] In 2014 she designed more stable nitrogen-based self-assembled monolayer treatments for metal surfaces.[6][7] The N-heterocyclic carbene self-assembled monolayers can be used in a range of applications, including biosensors.[8] Her interests lie in hydroboration, organometallic chemistry, chiral materials and persistent carbenes.[9] In 2010 Crudden became head of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council CREATE award in chiral materials, worth $1.6 million.[10] She became President of the Canadian Society of Chemistry.[11]

In 2015, as Principal Investigator of a group of ten collaborators, Crudden was awarded $8.8 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for major infrastructure purchases.[12] She won the Queen's University Research Opportunities Fund, which she used to create inexpensive, sensitive biosensors.[13] Her group prepares carbon-based ligands for metal surfaces, which can be used as sensing systems based on surface plasmon resonance.[13] In 2016, she and Dr. Suning Wang held a trilateral Canada-Japan-Germany symposium at Queen's looking at Elements Functions for Transformative Catalysis and Materials.[14] Crudden is a joint Professor at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules, based out of Nagoya University in Japan, where she runs a satellite lab. She is one of only four international collaborators at this Institute.[15][16] She was recognised as having made the most distinguished contribution to the field of catalysis by the Chemical Institute of Canada in 2018, when they awarded her the Catalysis Award.[16] Crudden also often comments on developments in the field of organic chemistry in various media outlets.[17][18][19][20][21]