Kendall Newcomb Houk is a Distinguished Research Professor in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research group studies organic, organometallic, and biological reactions using the tools of computational chemistry. This work involves quantum mechanical calculations, often with density functional theory, and molecular dynamics, either quantum dynamics for small systems or force fields such as AMBER, for solution and protein simulations. Early life and education K. N. Houk was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1943. He received his A.B. (1964), M.S. (1966), and Ph.D. (1968) degrees at Harvard, working with R. A. Olofson as an undergraduate and R. B. Woodward as a graduate student in the area of experimental tests of orbital symmetry selection rules. In 1968, he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University, becoming Professor in 1976. In 1980, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1986, he moved to UCLA. From 1988 to 1990, he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation. He was Chairman of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 1991 to 1994. Awards and achievements Houk received the Akron American Chemical Society (ACS) Section Award in 1984. He was awarded the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the ACS in 1988, the James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry of the ACS in 1991, the Schrödinger Medal of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC) in 1998, the Tolman Medal of the Southern California Section of the ACS in 1998, the ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2003, the Arthur C. Cope Award of the ACS in 2010, the Robert Robinson Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012, and UCLA's Glenn T. Seaborg Award in 2013. He received the 2021 Roger Adams Award of the ACS, the highest award in organic chemistry by the ACS, and the 2021 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for Theory in Nanotechnology. He and his collaborators won the Royal Society of Chemistry 2021 Horizon Prize for the discovery of pericyclases. His achievements have been recognized by a variety of U.S. and international fellowships. He was a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar, a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the von Humboldt Foundation U.S. Senior Scientist in 1981, an Erskine Fellow in New Zealand in 1993, the Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, Israel in 2000, and a