On 15 August, the first Arfvedson-Schlenk Award sponsored by Chemetall GmbH, Frankfurt, for outstanding work in the field of lithium chemistry was handed over by the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) during the 1999 General Assembly and an international IUPAC Congress. The award winner is Professor Dr. Paul von Ragué Schleyer.
The award ceremony took place at a technical symposium on preparative and structural aspects of lithium chemistry. The speakers were Prof. Heinrich Nöth (Munich) und Prof. Hans-Günther Schmalz (TU Berlin). The laudation was held by Prof. Ekkehard Winterfeldt, GDCh Vice President. Following the award presentation, the winner reported on his work in the field of lithium.
The scientist was honoured for his revolutionary work on the structure and reactivity of metal-organic compounds. Through the combination of computer-assisted prognoses and targeted syntheses, the today eremite professor of Erlangen-Nuremberg University provided numerous incentives for this and many other key areas of organic chemistry. At a very early stage he recognised the possibility to calculate and predict the structure of lithium organylene – a bold venture given the limited capabilities of electronic data processing at the time. Again and again his research group surprised the profession with experimental proofs that the structures found by X-ray analysis coincided with the predictions. With more that 200 publications on lithium chemistry alone, Prof Ragué Schleyer is by far the most eminent scientist in this discipline worldwide.
But Ragué Schleyers’ research work is not restricted to lithium chemistry. Before going to Erlangen in 1976, he was working in Princeton in the field of physico-organic chemistry. Among others, he studied the chemistry of adamantane, a hydrocarbon compound, and so-called carbo-cations – positively charged organic molecules and intermediary products of chemical reactions.
Paul von Ragué Schleyer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930. He studied in Princeton and Harvard where he graduated as a Ph.D in 1957. In 1965 he became a professor in Princeton. From 1976 to 1998 he was professor and director at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Since 1998 he has continued his academic and research activities as a chemistry professor at the University of Georgia, Athens. With Dr. Ron Snaith of Cambridge University, UK, Ragué Schleyer was the co-founder of the ALKCHEM Conference (International Conference on the Chemistry of Alkali and Alkaline Earth Metals) which took place in Cambridge in 1994 for the first time, and in Erlangen in 1997.
The Arfvedson-Schlenk Award with a 10,000 DM purse was sponsered in 1998 by Chemetall GmbH, the worldwide leading supplier of lithium and lithium compounds. A jury consisting of GDCh and Chemetall representatives will present the award probably every two years to German and foreign scientists for excellent work in the field of theoretical and practical lithium chemistry.
The award is named after the Swedish scientist August Arfvedson who discovered the element lithium in 1817, and the German Wilhelm Schlenk who was the first one to synthesise lithium-organic compounds in 1917.
Chemetall is a 100 percent subsidiary of Dynamit Nobel AG, Troisdorf, in the group of Metallgesellschaft AG, Frankfurt
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Ragué Schleyer
Contact: Guido Kruppa
Phone: +49 69 7165 2030
Mail: publicrelations@chemetall.com
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