The event has been cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns.
The 2020 TCR Lecturer is Benjamin List, Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany.
The Chemical Record (TCR) Lecture award was initiated in 2002 shortly after the start of the journal The Chemical Record. It has become a high-profile series with a view to fostering international and interdisciplinary exchange. The TCR Lecturer is selected by a committee consisting of the Editorial Board of The Chemical Record and the immediate past TCR Lecturer. The lecture takes place annually as part of the Spring Meeting of the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ).
Benjamin List studied at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in 1997 for work supervised by Johann Mulzer. From 1997–1998, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Richard Lerner and Carlos F. Barbas III at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA. In 1999, he was made assistant professor at the same institution. In 2003, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, where he is currently Managing Director of the Institute and Director of the Department of Homogeneous Catalysis.
Benjamin List’s current research interests include the development of new concepts in organocatalysis, transition-metal catalysis, and biocatalysis. List has received numerous prizes and awards. Among others, he received the Carl Duisberg Memorial Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) in 2003, the Otto Bayer Prize in 2012, the Ruhr Prize for Art and Science in 2013, and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2016.
List was visiting professor at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2005 and at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea in 2008. Since 2004, he is Honorary Professor at the University of Cologne (Institute for Organic Chemistry), Germany. In 2018, he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldia.
The TCR Lecture series has included many renowned speakers from a wide range of fields in chemistry:
2019: Keiji Maruoka, Kyoto University, Japan.
2018: Michael Grätzel, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
2017: Helma Wennemers, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
2016: David MacMillan, Princeton University, USA
2015: Scott J. Miller, Yale University, New Haven, USA
2014: Scott A. Snyder, The Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, USA
2013: Andrew B. Holmes, University of Melbourne, Australia
2012: E.W. “Bert” Meijer, Eindhoven University of Technology, NL
2010: Hisashi Yamamoto, University of Chicago, USA
2009: Gabor Somorjai, University of California, Berkeley, USA
2008: Michel Rohmer, Univ. Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France
2006: Anthony R. West, University of Sheffield, UK
2005: Malcolm Chisholm, Ohio State University, USA
2005: Bruno Scrosati, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
2004: Robert M. Metzger, University of Alabama, USA
2004: Koji Nakanishi, Columbia University, USA
2004: Christian Wandrey, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany, USA
2003: Gerhard Ertl, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Germany, USA
2003: Reinhard Hoffmann, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
2003: Yuan T. Lee, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
2002: Roy H. Doi, University of California, Davis, USA
2002: Steven V. Ley, Cambridge University, UK
