Professor Philip Mountford, University of Oxford, UK, has been awarded the 2012 Frankland Award by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). This honor is presented every two years for research in organometallic or coordination chemistry, and Mountford was recognized for his work on metal–ligand multiple bonding of early transition metals and its application to polymerization catalysts and main-group and lanthanide chemistry.

The prize was presented at an RSC Awards Symposium at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on March 13, 2013, where Professor Mountford delivered the prize lecture.

Philip Mountford studied at the University of Oxford, UK, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1990 for work supervised by Malcolm L. H. Green. After a research fellowship at the same institution, he was made lecturer at the University of Nottingham, UK, in 1992. He rejoined the University of Oxford in 1998, and became professor in 2006.

Mountford´s research interests are in transition-metal hydrazide complexes, and ring-opening and olefin polymerization catalysts. Recently, this has included the synthesis and characterization of two-coordinate silylenes and the catalytic imtermediates associated with a hydrohydrazination catalyst.

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• A Generic One-Pot Route to Acyclic Two-Coordinate Silylenes from Silicon(IV) Precursors: Synthesis and Structural Characterization of a Silylsilylene,
  Andrey V. Protchenko, Andrew D. Schwarz, Matthew P. Blake, Cameron Jones, Nikolas Kaltsoyannis, Philip Mountford, Simon Aldridge,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52(2), 568–571.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201208554
• A remarkable switch from a diamination to a hydrohydrazination catalyst and observation of an unprecedented catalyst resting state,
  A. D. Schwarz, C. S. Onn, P. Mountford,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51(49), 12298–12302.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201206249
• A stable two-coordinate silylene,
  A. V. Protchenko, K. H. Birjkumar, D. Dange, A. D. Schwarz, D. Vidovic, C. Jones, N. Kaltsoyannis, P. Mountford, S. Aldridge,
  J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 6500–6503.
  DOI: 10.1021/ja301042u