Professor Vivian Wing Wah YAM, the Philip Wong Wilson Wong Professor in Chemistry and Energy and the Chair Professor of Chemistry, has become the first Asian and Chinese recipient of the Bailar Medal. Professor Yam was invited to deliver two Bailar Medal Lectures on 24 and 25 April at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

The Bailar Medal has been established for over fifty years, and is awarded every year to the scientist who has made distinguished contributions to the fields of inorganic and coordination chemistry worldwide. Previous awardees include Nobel Prize laureates. They are Professors Henry Taube (1983), Jean-Marie Lehn (1987), Robert H. Grubbs (2005) and Richard R. Schrock (2015). Other Bailar Medalists include Professors Fred Basolo (Northwestern University), Richard Holm (MIT; Harvard), Malcolm L. H. Green (Oxford University), Harry B. Gray (California Institute of Technology), Jack Halpern (University of Chicago), Stephen J. Lippard (MIT), F. Albert Cotton (Texas A&M), Michael Grätzel (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), Jacqueline K. Barton (California Institute of Technology), Omar Yaghi (University of California – Berkeley), etc., and Professor Yam is the first Asian and Chinese who has been bestowed with this prestigious award.

The Bailar Medal and Lectures commemorate Professor John Christian Bailar, Jr., known as the father of American coordination chemistry and a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois from 1928 until his death in 1991. Professor Bailar served as President of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 1959 and was in large part responsible for the founding of the journal Inorganic Chemistry in 1962. Professor Bailar is the recipient of the ACS Award for Distinguished Service to Inorganic Chemistry, Priestley Award (the ACS’s highest honour), Frank Dwyer Medal, Alfred Werner Gold Medal, Heyrovsky Medal, Ferst Award, Chernyaev Jubilee Medal, and many other honours. The award of the Alfred Werner Gold Medal demonstrated the esteem in which Prof. Bailar was held by coordination chemists throughout the world.

Prior to the award to Professor Yam in 2023, all forty-eight Bailar Medalists had been mainly from the United States and European countries etc. Professor Yam's distinguished achievements in the fields of inorganic chemistry and coordination chemistry, as well as her significant contributions to the rational design and synthesis of novel luminescent organometallic molecular functional materials, made her the first Asian and Chinese scientist to receive this prestigious Bailar Medal.