Hermenegildo Garcia “Metal nanoparticles on few layers graphene as catalysts”
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
Hermenegildo García is full Professor at the Instituto de Tecnología química of the Technical University of Valencia, a joint centre of the Technical University of Valencia and the Spanish National Research Council and Honorary Adjunct Professor at the Centre of Excellence in Advanced Materials Research of King Abdullaziz University. He made postdoctoral stay at the University of Reading with Professor Andrew Gilbert and several sabbatical leaves in the group of Professor J.C. Scaiano at the University of Ottawa. Prof. Garcia has been active in the field of heterogeneous catalysis working with porous catalysts and nanoparticles, has published over 550 papers and has filed over 25 patents. Prof. Garcia is Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Bucharest and the recipient of the 2011 Janssen-Cilag award given by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry and the 2008 Alpha Gold of the Spanish society of Glass and Ceramics.
Frank Glorius “On discovery in catalysis”
Organic Chemistry Institute, Munster, Germany
Frank Glorius was educated in chemistry at the Universität Hannover, Stanford University (Prof. Paul A. Wender), Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung and Universität Basel (Prof. Andreas Pfaltz), and Harvard University (Prof. David A. Evans). He began his independent research career at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung (Mentor: Prof. Alois Fürstner) in 2001 and was appointed Associate Prof. at the Philipps-Universität Marburg in 2004. Since 2007 he is a Full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. His research program focuses on the development of new concepts for catalysis and their implementation in organic synthesis. The group is especially interested in the chemistry of N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs), C-H activation, asymmetric arene hydrogenation, (asymmetric) NHC organocatalysis, photoredox catalysis, heterogeneous catalysis with common and with tailor-made, surface-modified nanoparticles and, the development of useful screening methodology. This work was acknowledged by a couple of distinguished awards, such as the OMCOS award, the Leibniz award of the DFG (highest German research award), an ERC grant and the 2014 and 2015 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher acknowledgment.
Graham J. Hutchings “Catalysis using supported gold and palladium nanoalloy catalysts”
Cardiff Catalysis Institute, UK
Graham Hutchings, born 1951, studied chemistry at University College London. His early career was with ICI and AECI Ltd where he became interested in gold catalysis. In 1984 he moved to academia and has held chairs at the Universities of Witwatersrand, Liverpool and Cardiff and currently he is Director of the Cardiff Catalysis Institute. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009, and he was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 2013.
Stuart Macgregor "Adventures in C-H activation: from pentane to biphenylpyridine and back again"
Heriot Watt University, UK
Stuart Macgregor was born in Edinburgh in 1966 within earshot of the Murrayfield roar, when there still was one. He did his BSc (1988) and PhD (1992) at the University of Edinburgh, working on the structural and electrochemical properties of metallaboranes. He was awarded a NATO Western European Fellowship to work with Odile Eisenstein at the Université de Paris-Sud (1992-1994), where he first encountered density functional theory. He then spent two years at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995-1997) before returning to Edinburgh to take up a Lectureship at Heriot-Watt University in 1997. He was promoted to Reader in 2006 and full Professor in 2009 and served as Head of the Institute of Chemical Sciences from 2010 to 2015. Stuart's research uses computational chemistry to model chemical structure and reactivity of transition metal systems, especially those of relevance to homogeneous catalysis and metal-mediated organic synthesis. Techniques are based on high-level quantum mechanics, primarily density functional theory and hybrid QM/MM approaches and involves strong collaboration with experimentalists.
Nicholas J. Turner. “Biocatalytic cascade reactions enabled by synthetic biology”
Manchester University, UK
Nick Turner obtained his DPhil in 1985 with Professor Sir Jack Baldwin and from 1985-1987 was a Royal Society Junior Research Fellow, spending time at Harvard University with Professor George Whitesides. He was appointed lecturer in 1987 at Exeter University and moved to Edinburgh in 1995, initially as a Reader and subsequently Professor in 1998. In October 2004 he joined Manchester University as Professor of Chemical Biology where his research group is located in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology Biocentre (MIB: www.mib.ac.uk). He is Director of the Centre of Excellence in Biocatalysis (CoEBio3) (www.coebio3.org) and also a co-founder and Scientific Director of Ingenza (www.ingenza.com), a spin-out biocatalysis company based in Edinburgh and more recently Discovery Biocatalysts. He is a member of the Editorial Board of ChemCatChem and Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis. His research interests are in the area of biocatalysis with particular emphasis on the discovery and development of novel enzyme catalysed reactions for applications in organic synthesis. His group are also interested in the application of directed evolution technologies for the development of biocatalysts with tailored functions.
