It is important for the sustainability of Chemistry that excellence in early career researchers is both recognized and rewarded. Since 2000, IUPAC has done this by awarding annual prizes for the most outstanding Ph.D. theses in the area of the chemical sciences. In 2014, Solvay joined this initiative to establish the IUPAC-SOLVAY International Award for Young Chemists. The Awards are made based on detailed analysis of a 1000-word essay on the candidate’s research. The prize selection committee is comprised of members of the IUPAC Bureau and a Senior Science Advisor from Solvay, with a wide range of expertise in chemistry, and was chaired in 2016 and 2017 by Dr. Mark C. Cesa, IUPAC Past President. There was a good global representation of candidates, with 34 applications from 19 countries. After consideration of the quality, originality and importance of the presentations, they decided unanimously to award the 2017 prizes to the following five essays:
“Donor-Acceptor Constructs for Optical Oxygen Sensing and Corroles: Photophysics, Electronic Structure, and Photochemistry”, Christopher Michael Lemon, Harvard University, USA.
“Spectroscopic Investigations into the Excited-State Processes and Reactivity of Ruthenium(II) Polypyridyl Complexes”, Fergus Eoin Poynton, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
“Synthesis and Self-Assembly of Anisotropic Plasmonic Nanoparticles”, Leonardo Scarabelli, Universidade de Vigo, Spain.
“Precision at the Nanoscale: on the Structure and Property Evolution of Gold Nanoclusters”, Chenjie Zeng, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
“Design and Synthesis of Composite Photocatalysts and Their Structure-Activity Relationship Study”, Nan Zhang, Fuzhou University, China.
The Winners were invited to present their award winning work at the 46th IUPAC World Chemistry Congress, which was held in São Paulo, Brazil between 9th and 14th July 2017. In addition, the winners were invited to submit a short critical review on aspects of their research topic for publication, following peer review, in Pure and Applied Chemistry. In this issue, we include the papers from Christopher M. Lemon, Nan Zhang, Leonardo Scarabelli, and Chenjie Zeng. Papers from the winners of the previous (2016) IUPAC-SOLVAY International Award for Young Chemists, Golder et al. [1] and Vinogradova [2] were published in 2017.
Article note
A collection of peer-reviewed articles by the winners of the 2017 IUPAC-SOLVAY International Award for Young Chemists.
References
[1] M. R. Golder, L. N. Zakharov, R. Jasti. Pure Appl. Chem.89, 1603 (2017).Search in Google Scholar
[2] E. V. Vinogradova. Pure Appl. Chem.89, 1619 (2017).Search in Google Scholar
©2018 IUPAC & De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more information, please visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
