Gérard Jaouen - Biography#

Gérard Jaouen did graduate work at the University of Rennes. He spent the year 1973-1974 at Cambridge working with Professor Jack Lewis (now Lord Lewis), and on a number of occasions since has spent extended periods in Canada, at McMaster University and at McGill. He became a member of the CNRS in 1970, was appointed Directeur de Recherche in 1976 and became Professor at the Ecole Nationale de Chimie in Paris in 1982, where in 1984 he set up a CNRS Associated Research Unit of which he was the director till 2009, has been elected as a member of the CNRS national Committee and as a member of the CNU (French National Committee for Universities). He is a member of the ParisTech International Scientific Council set up in 2008.

In 1979 Dr. Jaouen decided to focus his interests in a new direction: that of bioorganometallics. At that time the situation was “hit and miss”, with some genuine but rare successes, as well as a number of obstacles obscuring the way forward, and in general an outlook that did not appear bright.

In the mid-1980’s, this embryonic field was overshadowed by the supremacy of research on organometallic catalysis. The field has now flourished and has been recognized formally as an important part of the future of organometallic chemistry (Organometallics, 2011, 30, 20). In addition, the topic has already entered into the undergraduate curriculum through its incorporation into a recent textbooks.

These novel ideas have been presented in meetings all over the world.

Professor Jaouen is the author of about 400 papers including 17 reviews (8270 citations), and holds 14 patents. His achievements in bioorganometallic chemistry have been recognized by many award. For example he has been elected to the “Institut Universitaire de France” in 1997. He received in 2001 a von Humboldt award in Berlin and was elected by the Royal Society of Chemistry as the Centenary Lecturer 2003 and has received a Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Chemists in 2002, the Bioorganometallic Award in Zurich (2004) and several named lectures (e.g. Dublin, Montreal). Gérard Jaouen was awarded “Chevalier dans l’ordre de la Légion d’Honneur” (2006) and elected as a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (2012).