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Visiting professorships in 2024

The Liebig-College invites every year visiting research professors, who give top-cailber lectures and seminars complementary to the themes of the JLU research groups. In 2024 our visiting professors will be:

Prof. David A. Nicewicz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)

Prof. David A. Nicewicz received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Subsequently he completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey S. Johnson  at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006. After performing postgraduate studies in the group of Prof. David. W. C. MacMillan at Princeton University, he began his independent career as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolian at Chapel Hill in 2009, becoming Associate Professor in 2015 and Full Professor in 2018. 

Prof. Nicewicz's research focuses on new reaction development with a special focus on organic photoredox catalysis. He will be our guest from the 3rd of June to the 7th of June 2024.

Prof. Manuel Orlandi (University of Padova, Italy)

Prof. Manuel Orlandi obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Maurizio Benaglia and Prof. Franco Cozzi at the University of Milan. Afterwards, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Matt S. Sigman as a postdoc at the University of Utah in 2016. He moved back to Italy in 2018, and after working for Janssen for a short period, he joined the faculty at the Department of Chemical Sciences of the University of Padova as an Assistant Professor.

Prof. Orlandi's research concentrates on asymmetric catalysis, but also organic synthesis and physical organic chemistry. He will be our guest from the 28th of July to the 3rd of August.

Prof. Michel Gravel (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)

Prof. Michel Gravel obtained his B.Sc. (Pharmaceutical Chemistry) at the Université de Sherbrooke and his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Prof. Dennis G. Hall. During his graduate work, he developed a new polymeric support for the immobilization and further reactions of boronic acids. He also developed a novel asymmetric Lewis acid-catalyzed allylboration reaction. He then joined the group of Prof. Viresh H. Rawal at The University of Chicago for a postdoctoral fellowship. In Chicago, he worked on hydrogen bond-catalyzed aldol reactions and on the total synthesis of the indole alkaloid aspidophytine. He joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan in August 2006 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 2011, then to full professor in 2018. Prof. Gravel will give lectures on the energetic span model on the 14th and 29th of August. 

Prof. Renana Gershoni-Poranne (Technion, Israel)

Prof. Renana Gershoni-Poranne earned her M.Sc. at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Keinan. She continued her studies her studies there under the guidance of Prof. Stanger, conducting fundamental research on the properties of aromatic compounds and ultimately obtaining her Ph.D. in 2015. Following her Ph.D., she joined Prof. Chen's at ETH Zürich, initially as a postdoc and later as a group leader. After two years as a Branco Weiss Fellow, she was appointed as an Assitant Professor at the Technion in 2021. 

Prof. Gershoni-Poranne's research focuses on the investigation of fundamental molecular properties and concepts, such as aromaticity and catalysis. She will be visiting us from the 15th of September to the 2nd of October.

Prof. Bartosz A. Grzybowski

Bartosz A. Grzybowski is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST, South Korea) and a Director of the IBS Center for Algorithmic and Robotized Synthesis (CARS) located therein. He is also Professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences. Although he has spent a large fraction of his research career on esoteric problems of self-assembly and non-equilibrium systems, he considers his most impactful discoveries to be in the area of computer-driven synthesis (e.g., the Chematica/Synthia and Allchemy programs). The chemical AI algorithms and robotics systems Grzybowski develops find applications in both academic and industrial settings, and have ramifications for the issues of global chemical production, circular economy, and national security. Grzybowski is an author of 300+ articles (H = 91), and over the years received numerous accolades of which the 2016 Feynman Prize and the 2022 Foundation for Polish Science Prize are closest to his heart. He started several companies, and has advised various industrial and governmental bodies in areas ranging from AI to oil drilling. Prof. Grzybowski will be visiting us for the first half of October