Jean-Marie LEHN was born in Rosheim, France in 1939. In 1970 he became Professor of Chemistry at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg and from 1979 to 2010 he was Professor at the Collège de France in Paris. He is presently Professor at the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS). He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987 for his studies on the chemical basis of “molecular recognition” (i.e. the way in which a receptor molecule recognizes and selectively binds a substrate), which also plays a fundamental role in biological processes. Over the years his work led him to the definition of a new field of chemistry, which he has proposed calling “supramolecular chemistry” as it deals with the complex entities formed by the association of two or more chemical species held together by non-covalent intermolecular forces, whereas molecular chemistry concerns the entities constructed from atoms linked by covalent bonds. Subsequently, the area developed into the chemistry of "self-organization" processes extending also more recently to "adaptive chemistry", dynamic networks and complex systems. Author of over 1000 scientific publications, Lehn is a member of many academies and institutions. He has received numerous international honours and awards.
Tomislav Friščić is a Professor and Leverhulme International Chair in Green and Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Birmingham. His team is developing the solid state as a medium for safer, environmentally-friendly synthesis and materials development – with mechanochemistry and photochemistry playing central roles. He received a B.Sc. in Chemistry with Branko Kaitner, focusing on Chemical Crystallography (University of Zagreb, 2001), Ph.D. in organic solid-state photochemistry with Leonard MacGillivray (University of Iowa, 2006), followed by post-doctoral research with William Jones at the Pfizer Institute for Pharmaceutical Materials Science, and a Herchel Smith Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2008). He was a Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Mechanochemistry and Solid-State Chemistry at McGill University (Canada) until 2022. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, corresponding member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and former Chair of the Canadian National Committee for Crystallography. He is a co-founder of two “CleanTech” companies, and his group’s work was recognised by awards, including RSC Corday-Morgan Medal (2023), NSERC John C. Polany Award (2022), Brusina Medal of the Croatian Society of Natural Sciences (2021), etc.
Tomislav Friščić
Niveen Khashab
Niveen M. Khashab is a Professor of Chemistry at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). After her doctoral studies at the University of Florida, she joined sir Fraser Stoddart’s Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, and then at Northwestern University working on supramolecular chemistry. Her current efforts focus on intrinsically porous materials (IPMs) for energy intensive separations and supramolecular assembled capsules (SACs) for encapsulation, delivery and biomedical applications. She is the recipient of the Crow Award in Organic Chemistry in 2004, AlMaraai Award for Nanotechnology in 2013 and the L’Oréal-Unesco Women in Science International Award in 2017. In 2021, she was named a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society. She is on the editorial board of 10 scientific journal (ACS, RSC, Wiley) and currently serving as an associate editor at Chemistry of Materials (ACS).
Omar M. Yaghi is a James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. He is the founder of reticular chemistry which has many applications in clean energy, clean air, and clean water, to mention a few. He has received honors from seventeen countries including Materials Research Society Medal (2007), American Chemical Society Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2009), King Faisal International Prize in Science (2015), Royal Society of Chemistry Spiers Memorial Award (2017), Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2017), BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences (2017), Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2018), ENI Award for Excellence in Energy (2018), Gregori Aminoff Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2019), U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2019), August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann Medal of the German Chemical Society (2020), Royal Society of Chemistry Sustainable Water Award (2020), VinFuture Prize for Emerging Science and Technology (2021), German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2022), and Exner Medal for Direct Impact on Science and Society, Austria (2023).
Omar M. Yaghi
Jerry Atwood
Jerry Atwood is currently an Emeritus Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. In the 1970s he published his first article on ‘liquid clathrates’, drawing the attention of Janusz Lipkowski, who was organizing the first International Symposium on Clathrate Compounds and Molecular Inclusion Phenomena. Janusz invited several people based only on their recent publications, and in 1980 Jerry attended the symposium in Warsaw. That original symposium ultimately became the International Seminar on Inclusion Compounds. At the first meeting, the participants took a series of initiatives: (i) to continue with the symposium series on a biennial basis, (ii) to found a new scientific journal and (iii) to prepare a book series on inclusion compounds. They left with the realization of having just created a new subdiscipline of chemistry, i.e. the study of inclusion compounds. To date Jerry has published more than 800 articles (including several in Nature and Science) and his H-index is greater than 100. His broad range of research interests include porous molecular materials, metal-organic nanocapsules and solid-state properties of pharmaceutical crystals. However, more than anything else, Jerry has launched the careers of a very large number of former students and coworkers.
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