Professors Clémence Corminboeuf and Jérôme Waser, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), France, have been jointly awarded the 2014 Werner Prize. This prize is awarded by the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS) to promising scientists under the age of 40 who do not have a tenured position. The award will be presented at the SCS Spring Meeting in Fribourg, Switzerland, on April 24, 2014, where they will both give presentations.

Clémence Corminboeuf is recognized for “developing and applying state of the art computational and theoretical methods for interpreting and solving chemical problems in complex systems”.

Corminboeuf studied chemistry at the Université de Genève, Switzerland, where she completed her Ph.D. under the guidance of Jacques Weber and Thomas Heine in 2004. She carried out postdoctoral work with Yingkai Zhang and Mark E. Tuckerman at New York University, USA, from 2005–2006 and with Paul von Ragué Schleyer at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA, from 2006–2007. In 2007, she joined the EPFL.

Jérôme Waser is honored for the “development of novel synthetic methods and strategies to construct complex structures of potential biological interest”, such as alkynyl hypervalent iodine reagents, and the use of donor–acceptor activated cyclopropanes and cyclobutanes in the synthesis of nitrogen-substituted rings.

Waser studied chemistry at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in 2006 for work supervised by Erick M. Carreira. From 2006–2007, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Barry M. Trost at Stanford University, USA, and in 2007, he started his independent career at the EPFL.

Selected publications:

• Ping-Pong Protons: How Hydrogen Bonding Networks Facilitate Heterolytic Bond Cleavages in Peptide Radical Cations,
  Konstantin O. Zhurov, Matthew D. Wodrich, Clémence Corminboeuf, Yury O. Tsybin,
  J. Phys. Chem. B 2014.
  DOI: 10.1021/jp412123h
• Direct Assessment of Electron Delocalization on NMR Chemical Shifts,
  S. N. Steinmann, D. F. Jana, J. I.-C. Wu, P. von R. Schleyer, Y. Mo, C. Corminboeuf,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009, 48, 9828–9833.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.200905390
• Total Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Jerantinine E,
  Reto Frei, Davide Staedler, Aruna Raja, Raimo Franke, Florenz Sasse, Sandrine Gerber-Lemaire, Jérôme Waser,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 13373.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201305533
• A Highly Chemoselective and Practical Alkynylation of Thiols,
  Reto Frei, Jerome Waser,
  J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 9620–9623.
  DOI: 10.1021/ja4044196