© AvH / David Ausserhofer
UniCat professor selected for the Karl Ziegler Award by the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker
This year’s Karl Ziegler Award of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh - the German Chemical Society) will go to UniCat professor Helmut Schwarz. This prize is one of the most prestigious awards for chemists in Germany. It is conferred for outstanding achievements in the areas of chemistry in which the scientist Karl Ziegler - the award’s namesake - also conducted research. These areas particularly include organometallic and inorganic chemistry, organic and applied chemistry, polymer chemistry and catalysis. With the selection of Helmut Schwarz, one of the world’s leading researchers in the area of molecular chemistry is being honoured in 2015.
Schwarz has been a professor of chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin since 1983 and the President of the Humboldt Foundation since 2008. He worked at several research institutes in several other countries, including England, Israel, France and Japan. He is a member of various academies and panels, and served as vice-president of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). Schwarz has received numerous awards for his basic research work. These awards include the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Max Planck Research Award, the Liebig-Denkmünze medal of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, the Blaise Pascal Medal in Chemistry of the European Academy of Sciences and the 2014 Schrödinger Medal of the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists.
The Karl Ziegler Award is named after the German chemist and 1963 Nobel laureate Karl Ziegler (1898-1973) and comes with €50,000 and a gold medal. Helmut Schwarz was selected last week to receive the 2015 Karl Ziegler Award by a jury consisting of Paul Knochel, the 2009 Karl Ziegler laureate; Wolfram Koch, the executive director of the GDCh; Thomas Geelhaar, president of the GDCh; Dieter Jahn, former president of the GDCh; and Hans-Joachim Freund, Karl Ziegler laureate from 2011. The award will be presented to Helmut Schwarz on 30 August at the GDCh Science Forum Chemistry in Dresden.