Professor Roald Hoffmann, Cornell University, New York, USA, receives the Otto Warburg Medal in Bayreuth, Germany.
The Otto Warburg Medal prize was created by Heinz Hoffmann and has been awarded by the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (Gesellschaft für Biochemie und Molekularbiologie, GBM) since 1963. It is endowed with prize money of 25,000 EUR and is intended to commemorate the outstanding achievements of the eminent researcher Otto Heinrich Warburg, Nobel Prize winner for Medicine in 1931.
Professor Roald Hoffmann studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities, both USA, and obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1962. He joined Cornell University in 1965 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 1968. He remained at Cornell University until his retirement. His research has centered on the theoretical investigation of organic and inorganic substances, developing computational tools and methods such as the extended Hückel method, which he proposed in 1963. He developed with Robert Burns Woodward rules for elucidating reaction mechanisms – the Woodward-Hoffmann rules –, and introduced the isolobal principle.
He is the winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1981 and is a member of the Internatioal Advisory Board of Angewandte Chemie. In addition to being a renowned chemist, Hoffmann has also written poetry, plays, and several books dealing with philosophy and science.
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