Speakers > Plenary Speakers

Luisa De Cola is since November 2020 Professor at the University of Milan and head of the unit Materials for Health at the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, IRCCS, Italy. She is also part time scientist at the INT-KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany.

She was born in Messina, Italy, where she studied chemistry. After a post-doc in USA she was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna (1990). In 1998 she was appointed Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In 2004 she moved to the University of Muenster, Germany. In 2012 she has been appointed Axa Chair of Supramolecular and Bio-Material Chemistry, at the University of Strasbourg. She is recipients of several awards, the most recent being the Izatt–Christensen Award in Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry (2019), the gold Medal Natta (2020). She has been Nominated “Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur” by the President of the French Republic, François Hollande, and she is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, fellow of the American Institute For Medical and Biological Engineering ( AIMBE ) and member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

Her main interests are luminescent and electroluminescent systems and their assemblies, and nano- and porous structures for biomedical applications.

 Anne Ladegaard Skov is the head of the Danish Polymer Centre and a professor of polymer science and engineering specialising in design and utilization of silicone elastomers in the Danish Polymer Centre at Department of Chemical Engineering, DTU.

She holds a PhD in polymer physics from DTU. She was a research fellow at Cambridge University, UK, before taking up a position as assistant professor at DTU. In 2018, she was promoted to full professor.

She has received multiple prizes for her work on elastomers, including the Elite Research Prize 2022 awarded by the Danish Research Council.

She works with functionalization and formulation of silicone elastomers, with focus on silicone-based dielectric elastomers used for soft robotics and wearables. She is the co-founder of the company Glysious, which commercializes drug delivery devices from silicone-glycerol materials. She has published 160+ articles and holds multiple patents on silicones and elastomers.

 Nicola Hüsing is Full Professor for Materials Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Physics of Materials and Vice Rector for Research and Sustainability at the Paris-Lodron University Salzburg. In 2010 she was appointed as full professor for Materials Chemistry at the University of Salzburg. She is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Science as well as the European Academy of Sciences.

Her research interests focus on the liquid phase synthesis (sol-gel processes, hydrothermal approaches, etc.) of porous materials, inorganic-organic hybrid materials and mesoscopically organized systems, especially with respect to synthesis – structure – property relations.

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 Vincent Monteil obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Lyon in 2002 under the supervision of R. Spitz and C. Boisson where he worked on catalytic copolymerization of ethylene and butadiene. He subsequently moved to the group of S. Mecking (University of Freiburg then Constance) as a postdoctoral researcher working on catalytic polymerizations in water. In 2005, he returned to Lyon as a CNRS Research Associate in the C2P2 Laboratory that became CP2M (Catalysis, Polymerization, Processes and Materials) in 2021. He became CNRS Research Director in 2017. Since 2021 he is director of the Polymerization Catalysis Materials (PCM) team of CP2M Laboratory and of the Lyon Polymer Science Engineering consortium (LPSE, 3 academic laboratories, 16 industrial companies).

His research interests deal with the use of catalysis in polymer and materials synthesis (mainly polyolefins and silicones) and in their chemical recycling in a circular economy context.

He is Junior Distinguished Member of French Chemical Society (SCF) since 2017 and received the Young Researcher Prize of Catalysis Division of SCF in 2014 and the bronze medal of CNRS in 2011.

 Louis Fensterbank obtained his PhD in 1993 at SUNY Stony Brook under the guidance of Scott Sieburth. After a lecturer position at the Université Pierre & Marie Curie (UPMC), he was appointed in 1995 as a CNRS Chargé de Recherche with Max Malacria. In 2004, he became Professor at UPMC, now Sorbonne Université.

His research interests concern the discovery of new molecular transformations relying on radical or organometallic processes and their applications to the synthesis of substrates with relevant properties. His group also has a strong interest in organosilicon chemistry.

Co-author of more than 230 publications, he has received several awards, notably the Silver Medal of CNRS in 2017. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Senior Member of Institut Universitaire de France since 2021. 

T. Don Tilley is the PMP Tech Chancellor's Chair in Chemistry at UC Berkeley and is a Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

He received his BS degree in Chemistry from UT Austin, and a PhD from Berkeley working with Richard Andersen on organolanthanide chemistry. His postdoctoral studies were conducted in the labs of Bob Grubbs and John Bercaw at Caltech, and Luigi Venanzi and Piero Pino at ETH Zürich, in a US-Swiss exchange program. He began his independent career at the UC San Diego, where he was promoted to Professor in 1990, and then in 1994 he accepted appointments at UC Berkeley and LBNL.

Tilley is known for fundamental transition metal-silicon and organic materials chemistry, and for mechanistic studies of multielectron chemical transformations relevant to energy storage.

He has won the ACS award in Organometallic Chemistry (2002), the Wacker Silicon Award (2003), the Centenary Lectureship and Medal of the Royal Society (2007-8), the ACS Kipping Award in Silicon Chemistry (2008), and the ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry (2014). He has published ~500 papers.

Conference Title:

Transition Metal–Silicon Chemistry in Bond Activations and Chemical Transformations

Shigeyoshi Inoue obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Tsukuba in 2008 supervised by Prof. Akira Sekiguchi. Following postdoctoral study at the TU Berlin with Prof. Matthias Drieß, he established an independent research group within the framework of the Sofja Kovalevskaja program in 2010. Since 2015 he has been on the faculty at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

  His current research interests focus on the synthesis and reactivity of compounds containing low-oxidation state main group elements with unusual structures and unique electronic properties, with the goal of finding novel applications in synthesis, catalysis and materials science. A particular emphasis is placed on low-valent silicon and aluminium compounds.

  He received several awards including the Sofia Kovalevskaja-Award 2010 (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), ADUC-Prize 2011 (GDCh), Carl-Duisberg-Memorial Prize 2017 (GDCh), Eugen und Ilse Seibold Prize 2020 (DFG), and JSPS Prize 2022. He is also the recipient of ERC Starting Grant 2014 and ERC Consolidator Grant 2020.