François Diederich

  Professor François Diederich (born 9 July 1952 in Ettelbruck) is a Luxembourgian chemist specialising in organic chemistry. He obtained both his diploma and PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 1977 and 1979, respectively. After postdoctoral studies with Prof. Chapman at the University of California, Los Angeles and habilitation at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, he became Full Professor at UCLA in 1989. In 1992 he was appointed Professor of Organic Chemistry at ETH Zurich.

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Research interests

His research interests cover a wide range of topics. A multi-dimensional approach is used to study molecular recognition phenomena in chemistry and biology. This includes structure-based design of lead compounds for a number of targets such as plasmepsin II (malaria), t-RNA guanine transglycosylase (shigellosis), trypanothione reductase (African sleeping sickness), and catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT, Parkinson's disease). In the supramolecular research program, functionalized dendrimers are used as nano-sized functional molecules. Examples include artificial enzymes or hosts for molecular recognition as well as self-assembling transfection agents. Development of advanced functional materials is addressed by the design of fullerene-based molecular building blocks and carbon-rich acetylenic molecular architectures. His research group consists of over 30 PhD and postdoctoral students.

Honors and awards

He has received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (1979), the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1987), the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1992), the Otto-Bayer-Preis für Chemie (1993), the Janssen Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis (2000) and the Havinga Medal (2000), the Humboldt Research Prize (2005), the Burkhard-Helferich Prize (2005), and the August Wilhelm von Hofmann-Denkmünze (2006). He is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW), and the Real Academia Española de Ciencias.

Books

• Diederich, F.; Stang, P. J.; Tykwinski, R. R. (Eds.) "Acetylene Chemistry”, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004.
• Diederich, F.; de Meijere, A. (Eds.) "Metal-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions II”, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004.
• Diederich, F.; Stang, P. J. (Eds.) "Templated Organic Synthesis", Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 1999.
• Diederich, F.; Künzer, H. "Recent Trends in Molecular Recognition", Springer, Berlin 1998.
• Diederich, F.; Stang, P. J. (Eds.) "Metal-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions", Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 1998.
• Diederich, F.; Stang, P. J. (Eds.) "Modern Acetylene Chemistry", VCH, Weinheim, 1995.