Wolfgang Beck celebrates his 80th birthday on May 5, 2012. Beck is a well-known and highly respected chemist in the field of coordination and organometallic chemistry.

Wolfgang Beck received his Ph.D. in 1960 at the Technical University Munich, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Walter Hieber. After his habilitation at the TU Munich in 1963, he was appointed in 1968 to the Chair of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at the Ludwigs Maximilians University (LMU), Munich, Germany. He remained at LMU—apart from a visiting professorship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, in 1977—until his retirement in 2000.

His research interests are coordination chemistry, including metal complexes of biologically important ligands, dyestuffs, stabile radicals, and pseudohalogenides, as well as aspects of organometallic chemistry such as organometallic Lewis acids and hydrocarbon-bridged complexes. He has published over 500 papers on these topics and has successfully supervised 120 Ph.D. students. He has been awarded the Chemistry Prize of the Academy in Göttingen, Germany, and the Liebig Medal of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh, German Chemical Society).

• Metal Complexes of Biologically Important Ligands, CLXXVI.[1] Formation of Peptides within the Coordination Sphere of Metal Ions and of Classical and Organometallic Complexes and Some Aspects of Prebiotic Chemistry,
  Wolfgang Beck,
  Z. Anorg. Allg. Chem. 2011, 637(12), 1647–1672.
  DOI: 10.1002/zaac.201100137
• The Structures of δ-PdCl2 and γ-PdCl2: Phases with Negative Thermal Expansion in One Direction,
  J. Evers, W. Beck, M. Göbel, S. Jakob, P. Mayer, G. Oehlinger, M. Rotter, T. M. Klapötke,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2010, 49(33), 5677–5682.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201000680