Frank Würthner
Universität Würzburg
Biography
Frank Würthner received his education in Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart (doctoral degree 1994) and carried out postdoctoral research at MIT in Cambridge/MA (USA).
After two years at BASF and five years at the University of Ulm (Habilitation in 2001) he became chair professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg in 2002. Here he has served as head of the Institute of Organic Chemistry, dean of the Chemistry Department and founding director of the Center for Nanosystems Chemistry.
His main research interests include the synthesis of pi-conjugated molecules and functional dyes, their application in organic electronics, photonics and photovoltaics, the construction of complex supramolecular architectures composed of pi-scaffolds, the mechanistic elucidation of self-assembly processes, and the investigation of light-induced processes in dye-based nanosystems.
He has published more than 400 papers and is listed since 2014 regularly among the highly cited chemists of the last decade. He is an elected member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. His awards include the Arnold-Sommerfeld-Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Science (2002), the Elhuyar-Goldschmidt Award of the Royal Society of Spain (2016) and the Ta-Shue Chou Lectureship Award of Academia Sinica (2018).
RSC affiliations
Advisory board, Chem Soc Rev