Alois Fürstner is a native of Austria and obtained his PhD from the Technical University of Graz, Austria. After a postdoctoral stint with the late Prof. Oppolzer in Geneva, Switzerland, and completion of his Habilitation in Graz, he joined the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim, Germany, in 1993 as a group leader, where he was promoted to the rank of Director in 1998. He served as the Managing Director of this Institute from 2009-2011 and 2016-2017. His research interests focus on organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis, including applications to the total synthesis of structurally complex and biologically significant natural products. Topics of particular interest comprise the metathesis of alkenes and alkynes, the development and use of carbophilic Lewis acids based on platinum and gold, mechanistic and synthetic studies in the field of iron catalysis, and investigations into perplexing trans-addition and gem-addition reactions to alkynes.
In recognition of his work, Professor Fürstner received several awards, including the Leibniz Award from the German Science Foundation (1999), the IUPAC-Thieme Prize (2000), an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the ACS (2002), the first Mukaiyama Award (Japan, 2005), the Otto-Bayer-Prize (2006), the Heinrich Wieland Prize (2006), the Janssen prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis (2008), the Prelog Medal of the ETH Zürich (2011), the Karl Ziegler Prize of the German Chemical Society (2013), the Gay Lussac/Humboldt Prize (2014), and the ACS HC Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2016). He is a member of the German National Academy “Leopoldina”.
PROF. DR. Alois Fürstner
PROF. DR. Alois Fürstner
Director
Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung
Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany
