 Denmark was the third Eschenmoser lecturer in 2018, the first former Eschenmoser graduate student thus honored.Denmark began his independent academic research career in 1980 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his laboratory's early work focused on investigation of the Nazarov cyclization reaction and Claisen rearrangement.This work was later recognized by the Frederick Stanley Kipping Award to Denmark in 2014.