Matthias Driess, Professor of Organometallic and Inorganic Chemistry, Technical University of Berlin, Germany, has won the 2011 WACKER Silicone Award. The prize is awarded by the WACKER Group and includes 10,000 EUR prize money. The award was presented in a ceremony at Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace by Dr. Rudolf Staudigl, President & CEO of Wacker Chemie AG, and attended by Dr. Wolfgang Heubisch, Bavarian Minister of Science.

Driess receives the award for his pioneering work on low-valent silicon compounds, which – owing to their isolability and reactivity properties – now constitute promising building blocks in organosilicon chemistry and make it possible, for example, to produce catalysts which do not contain precious metals.

Matthias Driess studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 1988, he obtained his doctorate in the lab of Professor Walter Siebert. After spending a year in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, under the tutelage of Professor Robert West, Driess received his habilitation in 1993 with his postdoctoral thesis “Silicon and Phosphorus in Unusual Coordination”. Three years later, he was appointed to the chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and moved to the Technical University of Berlin in 2004.

• Wacker Chemie AG, Munich, Germany