ORCHEM Award for Florian Beuerle

At the ORCHEM Conference of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) Dr. Florian Beuerle, Privatdozent ( senior lecturer) at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), has been awarded the ORCHEM Award 2018. The prize recognizes his independent and innovative research in the field of organic chemistry. “I feel really honoured receiving this award. It shows that our work has been very well accepted by organic chemists in Germany,” says Florian Beuerle.

The prize is awarded every two years at the ORCHEM-Conference to two young scientists who have “qualified themselves through new, original, and ground-breaking scientific work in this field” according to the GDCh press release. The prize money is € 2,500 for each award.

Design and synthesis of molecular cage structures

Beuerle started his independent scientific work at the University of Würzburg in 2010 supported by a Liebig Fellowship. Since then, he is a junior research group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry where he explores the design and synthesis of complex molecular architectures built from small organic building blocks. In 2014, Beuerle and his group achieved a first breakthrough: By using the new synthetic approach of dynamic covalent chemistry, they were the first to synthesize a nanoscale molecular cube exclusively from light elements such as carbon, oxygen and boron. “Cubic structures are very unusual for carbon compounds, as well as the formation of 24 covalent bonds in an almost quantitative yield,” explained Professor Frank Würthner in his honorific speech at ORCHEM 2018.

In further projects, Beuerle succeeded in producing even more complex cage structures with reduced symmetry. “Such multifunctional structures are inspired by natural systems such as enzymes, but they are virtually unknown in the field of synthetic chemistry to date,” says the Chair of Organic Chemistry II, Frank Würthner.

Beuerle received his doctorate degree at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg and spent a postdoctoral stay at Northwestern University with Nobel laureate Professor Fraser Stoddart.

The ORCHEM

ORCHEM is the most important German conference in the field of organic chemistry. The 21st ORCHEM took place from 10 to 12 September 2018 at the Technical University of Berlin. It is organized every two years by the Liebig Association, a division of the GDCh. The GDCh is one of the most significant and largest chemical societies in the world.

Contact

PD Dr. Florian Beuerle, Institute of Organic Chemistry & Center for Nanosystems Chemistry (CNC), University of Würzburg, phone +49 931 31 83603, florian.beuerle@uni-wuerzburg.de