Professors Kent Kirshenbaum, Mike Ward, and postdoctoral researcher Galia Maayan have developed a library of folded peptide-like compounds – peptoids – that can be synthesized with embedded catalytic moieties for the selective synthesis of mirror image molecules. By attaching catalysts to amide nitrogen atoms they were able to affect the efficient enantioselective oxidation of a racemic mixture of alcohols. Their peptoid strategy may be easily altered to accommodate a variety of chemical catalysts, applicable to a host of pharmaceutically relevant transformations. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009, 106, 13679; doi:10.1073/pnas.0903187106). Discussions of this work can be found at Futurity.org (http://futurity.org/science-design/to-get-a-reaction-molecules-do-the-twist/) and a podcast featuring Professor Kirshenbaum can be found in the “Science and the City” (http://www.nyas.org/WhatWeDo/SciencetheCity.aspx) segment of the New York Academy of Sciences website.