Plenary Speakers

Each day of the congress started and ended with a one-hour plenary talk in the iconic Clyde Auditorium, affectionately known as the "armadillo".

Professor Sir Harold Kroto

Sir Harold (known as Harry), currently the Francis Eppes Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Florida State University, obtained a BSc in Chemistry (1961) and a PhD in Molecular Spectroscopy (1964) at the University of Sheffield. After Postdoctoral work at the National Research Council (Ottawa, Canada) and Bell Telephone Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ USA) he started his academic career at the University of Sussex (Brighton) in 1967. He became a professor in 1985 and a Royal Society Research Professor in 1991.

In 1996 he was knighted for his contributions to chemistry and later that year, together with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley (of Rice University, Houston, Texas), received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of C60 Buckminsterfullerene a new form of carbon.

Professor Dame Louise N Johnson

Louise Johnson read Physics at University College London and completed her PhD in Molecular Biophysics at the Royal Institution London (1965) under the supervision of Sir Lawrence Bragg and David Phillips. She was part of the team working on the structure of lysozyme, the first enzyme structure to be solved by X-ray diffraction. 

She joined the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford in 1967, where she began her structural studies on glycogen phosphorylase and regulation by phosphorylation. Her recent research has been with structure/function relationships in the protein kinases and the regulatory molecules of the cell cycle. 

She was appointed to the David Phillips Chair of Molecular Biophysics in Oxford in 1990 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society also in 1990. In 2003 she took up a joint appointment at the Diamond Light Source, the UK's new synchrotron source, as Director of Life Sciences. In 2003 she was awarded the DBE.

Professor Vivian W W Yam

Professor Vivian W.-W. Yam obtained both her BSc(Hons) and PhD from The University of Hong Kong, and is currently the Philip Wong Wilson Wong Professor in Chemistry and Energy and Chair of Chemistry there. She was elected to the Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fellow of TWAS, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. She was the recipient of the RSC Centenary Medal, the State Natural Science Award of PR China, and the Japanese Photochemistry Association (JPA) Eikohsha Award.

Her research interests include the photophysics and photochemistry of transition metal complexes and clusters, supramolecular chemistry, and metal-based molecular functional materials for luminescence sensing, optoelectronics, optical memory and solar energy conversion.

Professor Richard N Zare

Richard N. Zare was born on November 19, 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. degree in chemistry and physics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1964.  He is presently Chair of the Chemistry Department, Stanford University, and holds the titles of Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and HHMI Professor. 

He is renowned for his research in the area of laser chemistry, resulting in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level.  By experimental and theoretical studies he has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of molecular collision processes and contributed very significantly to solving a variety of problems in chemical analysis.

Professor Klaus Müllen

Klaus Müllen is one of the directors at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, a post he has held since 1989.  His broad research interests range from new polymer-forming reactions, including methods of organometallic chemistry, multi-dimensional polymers with complex shape-persistent architectures, molecular materials with liquid crystalline properties for electronic and optoelectronic devices to the chemistry and physics of single molecules, nanocomposites and biosynthetic hybrids. 

Furthermore, he is President of the German Chemical Society and an associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  His work has led to the publication of over 1300 papers and is one of the most cited authors in his field.

Professor Christopher M Dobson

Chris Dobson received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1976 and then spent time at Harvard and MIT before returning to Oxford in 1980. In 2001 he moved to the University of Cambridge as John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology. In December 2006 he was elected Master of St John's College, Cambridge.

His research interests have focused on defining the way that protein molecules fold up into the compact structures in which they function. More recently his work has been directed towards an understanding of the failure of proteins to fold correctly under some circumstances, and its consequences as the origin of human disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and diabetes.  

Chris Dobson has received many awards during his career, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1996 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2005. 

Professor Peter G Bruce

Professor Peter G. Bruce FRS FRSE FRSC, is Wardlaw Professor of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.  His research interests embrace the synthesis and characterisation of new materials (extended arrays and polymers) with new properties or combinations of properties, especially energy materials for new generations of energy conversion and storage devices. 

His research has been recognised by a number of awards and fellowships, including from the Royal Society, The Royal Society of Edinburgh and The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Professor Ben L Feringa

Ben L. Feringa obtained his PhD degree in 1978 at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands under the guidance of Professor Hans Wynberg. After working as a research scientist at Shell in the Netherlands and the UK, he was appointed lecturer and in 1988 full professor at the University of Groningen and named the distinguished Jacobus H. van 't Hoff Professor of Molecular Sciences in 2004. He was elected foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. 

Feringa's research has been recognized with a number of awards including the Koerber European science award, the Spinoza Award (2004), the Prelog gold medal (2005), the Norrish award of the ACS (2007) and the Paracelcus medal (2008). His research interests include stereochemistry, organic synthesis, asymmetric catalysis, molecular switches and motors, self-assembly and molecular nano-systems. 

Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart

Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, USA. Between January 1996 to August 2006, he was ranked by Thompson Scientific as the world's third most cited researcher in chemistry. He is one of the few chemists to have created a new field of chemistry over the past quarter of a century, by introducing an additional bond - the mechanical bond - into chemical compounds and has pioneered the use of molecular recognition and self-assembly to make mechanically interlocked compounds (catenanes and rotaxanes).

A native of Edinburgh, Scotland, Stoddart was appointed as a Knight Bachelor in the Queen's 2007 New Year's Honours List for his services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology.