William D. Jones

William D. Jones Charles F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry, The University of Rochester, USA

Webpage: http://www.chem.rochester.edu/faculty/faculty.php?name=jones William D. Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1953, and was inspired to work in inorganic chemistry as an undergraduate researcher with Mark S. Wrighton at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, 1975). He obtained a Ph.D. degree in chemistry at California Institute of Technology (1979), working with Robert G. Bergman. He moved to the University of Wisconsin as an NSF postdoctoral fellow with Chuck Casey, and in 1980 accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1987, and is now the Charles F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry. Professor Jones has received several awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1984), a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award (1985), a Royal Society Guest Research Fellowship (1988), a Fulbright-Hays Scholar (1988), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (1988), the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (2003), and an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2009). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), and a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2010). He also has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2003. Professor Jones' research interests include organometallic research in strong C-X bond cleavage, catalysis, model studies, mechanisms, kinetics, thermodynamics, and synthetic applications.

Peter Junk

Peter Junk

Nevitt Professor in Chemistry, James Cook University, Australia

Webpage:

http://www.jcu.edu.au/phms/chemistry/staff/JCU_106241.html

Peter Junk graduated from The University of Western Australia in 1984 obtaining a Bachelor of Science with first class honours in Chemistry, and completed his Ph.D in Organometallic Chemistry in 1988. His Ph.D. work involved the use of organometallic reagents in organic syntheses, and also the synthetic and structural aspects of organo- and amido- main group metal complexes. After four years employed in the petroleum industry, Peter held several Postdoctoral positions including two years with Prof. Jerry Atwood at Alabama, and one year with Prof. Glen Deacon at Monash University. In 1997, Peter gained an academic position at James Cook University as a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry. He was given an accelerated promotion to Senior Lecturer in 1999. He moved to the School of Chemistry at Monash University in 2001 where progressed to Professor of Chemistry. Since July 2012 he has been the Nevitt Professor of Chemistry at James Cook University. His main research interests are in rare earth and main group organometallic, organoamido and aryloxo chemistry, but has applied interests in X-ray imaging and corrosion inhibition. He has published in excess of 340 publications and is the Associate Editor of New Journal of Chemistry.

Stuart Macgregor

Stuart Macgregor Professor and Head of Institute of Chemical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, UK

Webpage: http://www.che.hw.ac.uk/cic/group.html Stuart Macgregor was born in Edinburgh in 1966 and received his BSc (1988) and PhD (1992) from the University of Edinburgh. His PhD was obtained under the supervision of Prof Alan Welch and Prof Lesley Yellowlees and concerned structural, electrochemical and spectroscopic studies of metallaboranes. In 1992 he won a NATO Western European Fellowship to work with Prof Odile Eisenstein at the Université de Paris-Sud in Orsay and he subsequently spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 1997 he returned to Scotland take up a lectureship at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He was promoted to a chair position in 2009 and has been Head of Institute since 2010. Stuart Macgregor's current research uses computational chemistry to model the chemical structure and reactivity of transition metal systems, often of relevance to homogeneous catalysis and metal-mediated organic synthesis. He is particularly interested in bond activation processes, especially those involving challenging C-H and C-F bond cleavage. Techniques employed are based on high-level quantum mechanics, primarily density functional theory and hybrid QM/MM approaches. Most of his work is performed in close collaboration with experimentalists.

Audrey Moores

Audrey Moores Assistant Professor, Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry, Associate Director of the Centre for Green Chemistry and Catalysis, McGill University, Canada

Webpage: http://moores-group.mcgill.ca/ Education: B.Sc, Chemistry, 2001, Ecole Polytechnique, France; M.Sc. and Ph.D. with P. Le Floch, Chemistry, 2005, Ecole Polytechnique, France Professional Career: 2006-2007: Post-doctoral Fellow with R. H. Crabtree, Chemistry, Yale University, USA; Since 2007: Assistant Professor, Chemistry, McGill University, QC, Canada Publications: 40 peer-reviewed publications, 2 book chapters Awards and Honors: Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2005, Ecole Polytechnique, France); Lavoisier Post-doctoral Fellowship (2005-2006); Science Communication Fellowship for Green Chemistry (2011, Environmental Health News and Advancing Green Chemistry) Research Interests: Our research focuses on synthesizing, characterizing and studying novel and simple catalysts, based on metal nanoparticles, ionic liquids and/or cellulose nanocrystals in order to propose innovative and recyclable catalysts for organic reactions. We are also interested in developing greener, solvent free, nanoparticles synthetic methods.

Hsyueh-Liang Wu

Hsyueh-Liang Wu Associate Professor of Chemistry, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Webpage: http://www.chem.ntnu.edu.tw/people/bio.php?PID=669 Hsyueh-Liang Wu was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He received his B.Sc. from National Tsing Hua University in 1997, and obtained his Ph.D. in 2004 under the supervision of Prof. Biing-Jiun Uang. He then carried out postdoc trainings in Osaka University (with Prof. Toshikazu Hirao, from 2005-2007), National Tsing Hua University (Prof. Biing-Jiun Uang, from 2007-2008), and MIT (with Greg. C. Fu, from 2008-2009). In 2009, he joined the Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan Normal University as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2013. His research interests include: synthetic organic chemistry and organometallic chemistry.

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Zuowei Xie

Zuowei Xie Choh-Ming Li Professor of Chemistry, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Webpage: http://www.chem.cuhk.edu.hk/faculty_xie_zuowei.htm Professor Zuowei Xie obtained a BSc degree from Hangzhou University in 1983 and a MS degree from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, The Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1986. After earning a PhD from a joint Ph.D. program of Technische Universität Berlin and Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry in 1990, he spent one year as a Research Associate in the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry and three years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Southern California. He then joined the Department of Chemistry at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995 as an Assistant Professor, and is currently a Choh-Ming Li Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean of Faculty of Science. His research interests encompass the chemistry of boron clusters, carboranes and metallacarboranes, organometallic chemistry of transition metals, homogenous catalysis and the activation of small molecules. Professor Xie has co-authored over 210 publications in peer-reviewed journals and received an array of honors and awards, including the State Natural Science Award in 2008, the Chinese Chemical Society Huang Yao-Zeng Award in Organometallic Chemistry in 2010, Research Excellence Award from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007 and the Croucher Award from The Croucher Foundation (Hong Kong) in 2003. He also serves on the editorial board of Organometallics, Dalton Transactions, Science China (Chemistry), Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers and Chinese Journal of Chemistry.

Zhenfeng Xi

Zhenfeng Xi Professor of Chemistry, Peking University, China

Webpage: http://www.chem.pku.edu.cn/xizf/revised/ Zhenfeng Xi was born in Henan Province, China. He received his B.Sc. degree from Xiamen University in 1983, and his M.Sc. degree from Nanjing University, Zhengzhou University and the Henan Institute of Chemistry in 1989. He joined Professor Tamotsu Takahashi’s group at the Institute for Molecular Sciences, Japan, as a Ph.D. course student in 1993 and obtained a Ph.D. degree in 1996. He took an Assistant Professor position at Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1997, after he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with Professor Takahashi at CRC. In 1998, he joined the College of Chemistry at Peking University, where he is now a Professor. Prof. Xi’s research interests include (1) Development of Organo-bi-metallic Reagents, (2) Reactive Organometallic Intermediate-based Organic Synthesis, and (3) Transition-metal Catalyzed Synthesis of Silacycles and Azacycles via Cleavage Si-C, silyl C-H, and C-N Bonds. He has published more than 200 papers in refereed journals, delivered more than 200 invited lectures to conferences, universities, research institutes, and industry around the world. Prof. Xi received several awards including Outstanding Young Investigator award from Hong Kong Qiu Shi Science & Technologies Foundation in 2000 and Yaozeng Huang Organometallic Chemistry Award in 2004. He serves for several international journals as editors or advisory board members, including Associate Editor of Applied Organometallic Chemistry (Wiley), Member of the advisory board of Synlett, Synthesis, Chem. Lett. and Asian J. Org. Chem., Member of the Consulting Board of Editors of Tetrahedron/Tetrahedron Letters. He also serves for several Chinese journals as editors or advisory board members, including Associate Editor of Chinese Science Bulletin, and Chemistry.

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