Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

PROFILE: Early Excellence in Physical Organic Chemistry

2011; Wiley; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/poc.1948

1099-1395

Jonathan R. Nitschke,

Supramolecular Self-Assembly in Materials

PhD (2001, T. Don Tilley, ‘Zirconocene-coupling Routes to Functionalized Macrocycles’, Berkeley) NSF Postdoc (2001-2003, Jean-Marie Lehn, Strasbourg) Maître-assistant then Swiss National Science Foundation Assistant Professor (Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Geneva, 2003-2007) Dalton Transactions European/African Lectureship (2011) EPSRC Leadership Fellowship (2010-2015) Werner Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society (2007) European Young Chemist Award at the first EuCheMS Congress (2006) The greatest scientific challenge for the next decade will be … working out how to get the world's economy off fossil fuels. The biggest problem that young scientists face is … a lack of societal recognition that science-based technology is the fundamental driver of economic growth, as opposed to fields like finance and law. I chose chemistry as a career because … nothing else seemed as interesting and compelling. If I were not a scientist, I would be … some kind of computer programmer (not a very good one). My biggest inspiration is … the fact that we all have a sense of wonder, hard-wired in. The most influential scientist in my career is … James Walker, the founder of Nanoptics, a small company in Gainesville, Florida where I spent two summers as an undergraduate intern. My worst nightmare is … that the moon landing was our high-water mark, and that our species flickers out millennia hence, still earth-bound. The most surprising thing I've realized since starting my career in academics is … you really can pick it all up as you're going along! I would have liked to have discovered … evolution by natural selection. A good day begins with … lots of caffeine. My favorite author or book (fiction) is … Thomas Pynchon. My favorite three songs are … Beethoven's 7th Symphony 2nd movement, The Police's Every Breath You Take, Jean-Jacques Goldman's Là-bas. Jonathan Nitschke Using a basic set of self-assembly “rules”, Professor Nitschke has rapidly achieved prominence for weaving small molecular building blocks into complex three-dimensional superstructures. He has recently been promoted to Reader at Cambridge University.