THE WOODLANDS, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 7, 2026--
AEGIS Hedging Solutions (“AEGIS” or the “Company”), a leading provider of commodity market intelligence, technology, and market infrastructure, today announced the appointment of Martin Fraenkel to its Board of Directors. Mr. Fraenkel served as President of S&P Global Platts, the commodity price benchmark and market data business, from 2016 until 2021.
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Mr. Fraenkel has spent more than three decades across the physical and financial commodity markets. He joined Platts in 2015 as Chief Content Officer, responsible for its global editorial organization and price assessment methodology; he was named President in September 2016 and served on the S&P Global Operating Committee. He became Vice Chairman of Platts in January 2021 and retired in September 2021. Before Platts, he was Global Head of Energy at CME Group, Global Head of Commodities at Crédit Agricole CIB, and Global Head of Energy, Base Metals and Agriculture at JPMorgan Chase. He began his career as a metals trader at Philipp Brothers.
He continues to serve in the market infrastructure he helped build. He is an Independent Non-Executive Director of the London Bullion Market Association and Independent Chairman of Pexapark, the renewable energy pricing and advisory platform, and served as an Independent Non-Executive Director of the London Metal Exchange from 2023 to 2025.
“Martin has spent his career on the infrastructure that makes commodity markets work: the benchmarks, the data, and the rules of the venues where risk actually changes hands,” said Bryan Sansbury, Chief Executive Officer of AEGIS. “That is the same ground AEGIS operates on. We give advice, we build software, and we run a regulated marketplace, and each of those depends on trust in how prices are formed and how a venue is governed. There are very few people who have done all three at scale. Martin is one of them.”
“Commodity markets are getting more complex, and the participants in them increasingly need advice, data and execution to work as one system rather than three. AEGIS has built that combination, and it operates its own regulated venue, which is a genuinely differentiated position. I look forward to working with Bryan and the Board on what comes next,” said Mr. Fraenkel.
Mr. Fraenkel holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, University of Oxford, a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, and an MBA from INSEAD.
The appointment follows the acquisition of AEGIS by Private Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, which succeeded Greenbelt Capital Partners and Baird Capital as the Company’s institutional investment partner. AEGIS said at the time that the investment would accelerate its investment in commodity-focused advisory, technology, artificial intelligence, proprietary data, and regulated market infrastructure. Mr. Fraenkel’s appointment adds depth across the broader commodity market ecosystem as the Company builds a Board for that next phase.
About AEGIS
AEGIS helps commodity market participants deploy, grow, and protect capital through integrated advisory, expertise, software, data, artificial intelligence, and market infrastructure solutions. By combining experienced professionals with purpose-built technology, AEGIS helps customers transform complex commodity market information into faster, more confident commercial decisions across revenue management and commodity risk management. Learn more at www.aegis-hedging.com.
Martin Fraenkel
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.
Many molecules come in versions that look alike but are not exactly identical, like right and left hands. Kagan, who is from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing reactions to produce the desired mirror image.
“The medicines we have today would not be possible without this chemistry,” said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.
Soai was shopping at a neighborhood supermarket when he heard he had won.
“I’m very excited to receive the very nice news,” Soai told the Nobel committee and journalists by phone. “Of course, this is one of the most exciting days in my life.”
Mirror images of the same molecule can have different properties. For example, one version of the chemical carvone smells like mint, while the other has a whiff of caraway, a spice often used in rye bread.
The alternate versions can also behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to be choosy about which mirror image they get. They want the version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that will make the sniffles worse.
The Nobel committee described Kagan and Soai’s work as a feat never previously achieved by anyone “other than life itself.”
“It might be difficult to say that this drug, or that drug, was developed using this,” said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “I would say all of them, because we use this as a tool, we use this as an understanding, how to develop catalysts, how they function.”
In the 1980s, Kagan’s work showed there might be a way to design reactions to produce one form of a molecule over the other. Years later, Soai perfected the process. He created the first-ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce only one of a molecule’s mirror images, in what’s now known as the Soai reaction.
“This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry,” Somfai said.
Even life prefers one mirror image over the other. DNA twists to the right, and the proteins in human bodies are made of mostly left-handed building blocks.
In addition to developing better medicines or perfumes, deciphering the mirror images of molecules can help scientists understand the chemical architecture of life, said chemist Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the journal Science.
Kagan, 95, is affiliated with the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. Soai, 76, is affiliated with the Tokyo University of Science.
Neither of the universities immediately responded to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winner in Stockholm.
Last year, three scientists won the chemistry Nobel for their development of new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside, laying the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvest moisture from desert environments.
This year's prizes began with the Nobel for medicine, awarded Monday to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics award announced Tuesday recognized a scientist's efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.
The literature prize is set to be awarded Thursday. After Friday’s peace prize is awarded, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, a small group of laureates or an organization.
This story has been corrected to correct that Kagan, not Soai, is 95.
Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Dazio reported from Berlin. Associated Press journalists Alexa St. John in Detroit, Catherine Gaschka in Paris and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
Japanese chemist Kenso Soai, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, leaves home for a press conference, in Shiki, Saitama prefecture, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Kyodo News via AP)
Japanese scientist Kenso Soai, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, leaves home for a press conference, in Shiki, Saitama prefecture, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Kyodo News via AP)
Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 7, 2026. Photo: (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)
Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 7, 2026. Photo: (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)
FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
