The newly endowed Morton L. Mandel Award is an annual award to honor and reward outstanding faculty members of the Department of Chemistry, the discipline in which Morton Mandel earned his bachelor’s degree.

The first recipient, to be recognized officially this summer, is Associate Professor Blanton S. Tolbert, whose work focuses closely on elucidating molecular details of the human immunodeficiency virus, more commonly known as HIV. A member of the Case Western Reserve faculty since 2012, Tolbert has made extraordinary achievements during the past academic year, including a featured cover story in the Journal of Molecular Biology that described new three-dimensional structures of molecules in the life cycle of HIV.

You can learn more about Dr. Blanton Tolbert’s accomplishments here.