Pr. Jean-Pierre SAUVAGE, Université de Strasbourg, France

2016 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry

From chemical topology to molecular machines

Jean-Pierre Sauvage was born in Paris in 1944. He received his doctoral degree at the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg in 1971, under the supervision of Jean-Marie Lehn, himself a 1987 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jean-Pierre Sauvage conducted his research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS from 1971 till 2014, at the University of Strasbourg. He made a postdoc in Oxford from 1973 till 1974. He is now Emeritus Professor, working in the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires in Strasbourg. He is member of the French Academy of Sciences. He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines" with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa.

Jean-Pierre's scientific work has focused on creating molecules that mimic the functions of machines by changing their conformation in response to an external signal. A large theme of his work is molecular topology, specifically mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures. He has notably described syntheses of catenanes and molecular knots based on coordination complexes.

Website: https://isis.unistra.fr/laboratory-of-inorganic-chemistry-jean-pierre-sauvage/