Perfil
Pierre Braunstein is Emeritus CNRS Research Director at the University of Strasbourg, where he remained for his whole career, except for one year at UC London (with Profs. Sir R. S. Nyholm and R. J. H. Clark) and another at the TU Munich (with Prof. E. O. Fischer, Nobel Laureate). He currently also holds various positions in China.
His broad research interests lie in the inorganic and organometallic chemistry of the transition and main group elements, where he has (co)authored over 650 scientific publications and review articles. He has given over 520 Plenary, Keynote, and Invited talks at international conferences and diverse institutions.
The topics explored by his group over the years involved the creation of new chemical bonds (in particular metal-metal bonds), metal complexes and metal clusters (bonding, structures, reactivity, catalysis), the elaboration of concepts rationalizing structure-reactivity relationships, hemilability, homogeneous catalysis (ethylene oligomerization, co-oligomerization olefins/CO and ethylene/polar olefins, transfer hydrogenation of ketones, alkane activation, dehydrogenative coupling of stannanes), the first examples and applications of molecular mixed-metal cluster-derived heterogeneous catalysts. His achievements also include the synthesis and complexation of polytopic functional ligands, the development of functional N-heterocyclic carbenes ligands, their metal complexes and catalytic applications, the synthesis, characterization and reactivity of bimetallic silyl complexes, the synthesis of new organic quinonoid molecules with delocalized p systems and their applications in chemistry and physics.
He has received numerous awards and honors, and is a member of Academia Europaea (2002), the European Academy of Sciences (2002), Corresponding Member of the Saragossa Academy of Sciences (Spain) (2002), member of the French Academy of Sciences (2005), the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2005), Foreign Member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (Portugal) (2015). He is also Head of the Chemistry Division of the European Academy of Sciences since 2015.
