Professor Jean Pierre Sauvage, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 2016, will visit Seville during the first week of March.
During his visit, he will give a lecture at cicCartuja on Monday 2nd March at 12:00 pm entitled “From Solar Energy Research to Molecules in Motion”.
Later, on Wednesday 4th March at 12:00 pm he will give another lecture at the Auditorium of the University of Seville entitled “Interlocking rings at the molecular level, machines and motors”. And on Thursday 5th he will take part in a talk-colloquium at the San Isidoro Secondary School, which is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year.
Professor Jean Pierre Sauvage is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Strasbourg and Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS. He studied chemistry at the School of Chemical Engineering in Strasbourg. He then joined the laboratory of Professor Jean Marie Lehn (Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 1987) to carry out his doctoral thesis on the development of macrocycles that complex cations (the famous cryptands). After completing his PhD, Prof. Sauvage completed a postdoctoral stay in the laboratory of Prof. Malcolm Green at the University of Oxford, UK, where he acquired important knowledge in organometallic and transition metal chemistry.
Back in Strasbourg, he joined Professor Lehn’s laboratory to develop a project using ruthenium complexes to break up water molecules and obtain hydrogen as a clean source of energy. In 1980, Professor Sauvage established his independent research group in which he developed different projects focused on electrocatalysis, homogeneous catalysis, inorganic photochemistry, using different metal complexes of nickel, copper, etc. From this initial work, the idea of preparing intertwined macrocycles using a metal as a template emerged, which led to the synthesis of the first catenane and later the first molecular knot. This chemistry has been developed over the last 40 years and has given rise to a whole chemistry for preparing rotaxanes, molecular switches and molecular machines.
Prof. Sauvage receiving the Nobel Prize in 2016
Professor Sauvage is the author of more than 500 publications that have received more than 36,000 citations. He has received numerous awards, is an honorary member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour of France, and Doctor Honoris Causa of several foreign universities. In 2016, for his research on molecular machines, Professor Jean Pierre Sauvage was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry shared with Professors Sir Fraser Stoddart and Ben Feringa.
Prof. Jean Pierre Sauvage, Prof. Sir Fraser Stoddart and Prof. Ben Feringa