Armin de Meijere
He was born 1939 in Homberg
(Niederrhein), studied chemistry at the universities of Freiburg and Gottingen and
obtained his doctorate at the University of Gottingen with a thesis entitled "The
Conformations of the Lower Bicycloalkyls" under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang
Luttke.
He spent two years
as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Kenneth B. Wiberg at Yale University in New Haven, CT
(USA), and obtained his "Habilitation" in 1971 at the University of Gottingen.
He became full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Hamburg in 1977, and
returned to the University of Gottingen as a Professor of Organic Chemistry in October
1989.
He has served as a
member of the Academic Senate at the University of Gottingen for two election periods, as
a dean of the Chemistry Department and as the Director of the Institut fur Organische
Chemie at the University of Hamburg. He is currently Director of the Institut fur Organische
Chemie at the University of Goettingen.
Over the years, he
has been visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, the IBM
Research Laboratory in San Jose, CA, the Technion in Haifa, Israel, Princeton University
in Princeton, NJ, the University of Aix-Marseille III, the Universita degli Studi,
Firenze, Italy, and the Ecole Normale Superieur, Paris, France.
He received a
fellowship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, obtained the award
"Dozentenstipendium" from the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie in 1972, he was
elected a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1992, and in 1996
received the Alexander von Humboldt-Gay Lussac prize of the French Ministery for Higher
Education and Research. In 1997 he was elected as a member of the Braunschweigische
Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, as an Honorary Professor of the St. Petersburg State
University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and nominated as a Fellow of the Japan Society for
the Promotion of Science.
He is editor or
member of the editorial board of a number of scientific journals, periodicals and books.
His scientific achievements have been published in over 350 original publications, review
articles, and chapters in books. His current research interests include the development of
new small-ring building blocks and their application in the synthesis of natural and
non-natural compounds; new highly strained polycyclic compounds with interesting
properties; application of organometallic complexes and catalysts in organic synthesis;
palladium-catalyzed sequential reactions; titanium-mediated cyclopropanation and other
transformations of carbonyl compounds; carbon compounds and organometallic complexes with
unconventional chemical and physical properties.