EuChemS Gold Medal Award

2024 – Avelino Corma

Avelino Corma, Professor and founder of the Instituto de Tecnología Química (CSIC-UPV) in Valencia (Spain), has been carrying out research in heterogeneous catalysis in academia and in collaboration with companies for nearly 40 years. He has worked on fundamental aspects of acid-base and redox catalysis with the aim of understanding the nature of the active sites, and reaction mechanisms. With these bases has developed catalysts that are being used commercially in several industrial processes. He is an internationally recognized expert in solid acid and bifunctional catalysts for energy chemicals, and for making more sustainable chemical processes, especially in the synthesis and application of zeolite catalysts. He has published more than 1400 research papers, and inventor on more than 180 patents. He earned his BS in Chemistry at Valencia University, PhD at Madrid under direction of Prof. Antonio Cortes, and spent two years postdoc at Queen´s University.

He presented a wide range of lectureship across the globe, such as the Director´s Distinguished Lecture Series at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory´s, 48th W. N. Lacey Lectureship in Chemical Engineering-Caltech (USA) in 2015, the Karl-Ziegler-Lectureship at the Max Planck Society (2007) and many more. He is also a recipient of numerous high profile awards: amongst many others, the European Inventor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the European Patent Office, the Blaise Pascal Medal for Chemistry de la European Academy of Sciences and the Principe de Asturias Award, ENI Award and the Spiers Memorial Award.  In addition, he holds a wide range of international academia memberships.

2022 – Dame Carol Robinson

Professor Dame Carol Robinson is a British chemist and former President of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is currently the Director of the Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery as well as a Professorial Fellow at Exeter College and holds the Chair of Dr Lee’s Professor of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford. She is noted as the first female Professor in both the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and prior to that at the University of Cambridge. 

Professor Robinson’s long and distinguished career has been marked by outstanding contributions across the fields of physical, medicinal, and biochemistry; an exemplary publication record, and numerous international honours and awards for her research all whilst promoting the role of women in science.  

Professor Robinson is globally recognised as a leader in the development of mass spectrometry to understand the 3D structure of large molecular compounds, specifically carrying out ground-breaking research on protein folding, ribosomes, molecular chaperones, and membrane proteins. Her cutting-edge work finds many applications from antibiotic resistance to drug design in both academia and industry. In addition to her academic role, she founded a successful biotechnology company, now in its fourth year, which focuses on mass spectrometry to discover novel medicines. 

2020 – Michele Parrinello

Professor Parrinello is an Italian physicist. He is currently Professor at the ETH Zurich and at the Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, in Switzerland. For his research, he has been awarded numerous prizes. Among them can be listed the 2001 American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry and the 2017 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences. More recently, Professor Parrinello received the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) in Chemistry. Furthermore, Professor Parrinello is the author of more than 600 publications. He is also a member of several academies, including the British Royal Society, the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

Professor Parrinello’s interests in Science are interdisciplinary. Together with Professor Car, he is still developing and applying the Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics method. This computational Chemistry software looks at the motion of individual atoms. This method has broad applications in physics and chemistry and allows scientists to understand atomic behavior in various range applications. Among them, the Car-Parrinello method helped studying the behavior of water near a hydrophobic graphene sheet, solving the heat transfer problems between Si/Ge superlattices, evaluating the critical point of aluminum and much more.

2018 – Bernard L. Feringa

The first European Chemistry Gold Medal in 2018 was awarded to Professor Bernard L. Feringa, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016. The ceremony took place at the 7^th EuChemS Chemistry Congress in Liverpool, UK during the opening session, and was presented by Herman Overkleeft, Chair of the International Award Committee for the European Chemistry Gold Medal (IACM).

Joachim Sauer (Chair)

Joachim Sauer received the Dr. rer. nat. degree in Chemistry from Humboldt University in Berlin in 1974, and the Dr. sc. nat. degree from the Academy of Sciences in (East-)Berlin in 1985. He is Senior Researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin where he was Professor of Theoretical Chemistry. Since 2006 he is external member of the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin (Max Planck Society). He is member of several Academies including the German National Academy Leopoldina and the Royal Society. His research has explored the application of quantum chemical methods in surface chemistry, particularly adsorption and catalysis, notably, the area of the structure and reactivity of transition metal oxide catalysts, zeolites and metal-organic frameworks.

He holds a honorary doctorate of University College London. The German Chemical Society (GDCh) awarded him with the Liebig Medal, the Federation of European Catalysis Societies (EFCATS) with the Francis Gault Lectureship, the American Chemical Society with the ACS Award in Surface Chemistry, and the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists (WATOC) with the Schrödinger medal.

1^st mandate by 31.12.2026

Maria José Calhorda

Maria José Calhorda received her PhD from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa, Portugal (1980) working on synthetic organometallic chemistry. She was a post-doc at the ICL, Oxford, and visited numerous research project in various institutions, which contributed to her developing a wide range of scientific interests, from the computational study of electronic structure, reactivity and properties of inorganic/organometallic systems, the design of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts, and the interface with biochemistry. She was Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Lisboa (UL), since 1996 and retired in 2019, remaining a scientific collaborator of one of the research units (BioISI – Biosystems & Integrative Sciences Institute). She was, among others, President of the Portuguese Chemical Society, member of the Senate (and its Comission for Scientific Affairs) of UL, coordinator of a research unit of UL (Center of Chemistry and Biochemistry, six years), Head of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, member of the IAEB (Dalton Transactions, RSC). She is a Fellow of Chemistry Europe (2016).

1^st mandate by 31.12.2026

Jurriaan Huskens

Jurriaan Huskens studied chemical engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, and obtained his PhD (1994) at the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands with Herman van Bekkum. After postdoctoral stays with Dean Sherry (UT Dallas, U.S) and Manfred Reetz (MPI Kohlenforschung, Germany), he became assistant professor (1998) with David Reinhoudt at the University of Twente, Netherlands where he became full professor of “Molecular Nanofabrication” in 2005. He received the Unilever Research Award 1990, a Marie Curie fellowship in 1997, the Gold Medal 2007 of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society, and a Fellowship of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, UK in 2019. He has been a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, United States (2013), the University of Padova, Italy (2018), and the University of Durham, United Kingdom (2019). His present research interests encompass multivalency, virus and DNA sensing, supramolecular chemistry at interfaces, supramolecular materials, nanofabrication, and green chemistry.

1^st mandate by 31.12.2026

András Perczel

András Perczel DSc., graduated in Chemistry in 1985 from Eötvös Loránt University. He is a Full professor of chemistry there since 2001, and Head of Organic Chemistry since 2016. He teaches organic and bio-organic chemistry, molecular and bio-spectroscopy (NMR, CD, IR). His expertise is the synthesis of peptides and glycopetides, expression and purification of proteins, as well as Bio-spectroscopy (CD, IR and NMR) and structure elucidation and dynamic characterization of peptides, foldamers & proteins. He also researches molecular modeling: MM, MD QM/MM and various QM methods.

He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea, as well as the the St István Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of the Pro Scientia gold medal (1993 & 1995), the Zemplén Géza award (1996), he achieved 1st price of the Faculty of Science, ELTE (1997), he was Scientist of the year in 2004 (Sanofi-Synthelabo), he is a Fulbright fellow (2006), 2011 Bolyai Prize (most prestigious hungarian scientific award) and 2021 Széchenyi Prize recipient.

1^st mandate by 31.12.2026

Marina Resmini

Marina Resmini is Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests are focused in the area of functional nanomaterials with applications at the interface between physical and bio/medical sciences, particularly as sensors and drug delivery systems. She has a strong track record of assembling successful multidisciplinary consortia with academic teams both in the UK and Europe as well as with industrial partners. She has a distinguished publication record in the area of nanomaterials, more recently focusing on imprinted polymers, nanogels and understanding the relationship between structure and functional properties. She is passionate about equality and positive actions that can drive changes towards a more diverse and inclusive environment in the Chemical Sciences. In 2011 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and since 2019 she has been the Chair of the RSC Inclusion and Diversity committee and also a member of the RSC’s Board of Trustees.

1^st mandate by 31.12.2026

• Herman Overkleeft, 2017 – 2022
• Markku Leskelä, 2017 – 2022
• Lesley J. Yellowlees, 2017 – 2022
• Veronica Vaida, 2017 – 2022
• Renato Zenobi, 2017 – 2022