Giuseppe Resnati - Biography #

A distinctive features of the research activity of Prof. Resnati has been his ability to address frontier fields after a highly original approach and well before these fields were recognized by the vast majority of the chemical community.

In the eighties, he focussed his interests on the asymmetric synthesis of selectively fluorinated compounds endowed with biological and/or pharmacological relevance. With his results he contributed significantly to the understanding of the strategic role of introduction of fluorine in drugs and bio-compounds.

In the nineties he devoted his interests to the fluorous chemistry, namely to the unique opportunities offered by reagents bearing a perfluoroalkyl chain. He introduced the first fluorous reagent, the perfluoro-cis-2,3-dialkyloxaziridenes, which he proved to be a powerful yet selective oxidizing agents.

As a recognition to his contribution to fluorine chemistry, he will be the chairman of the 21st International Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry (http://fluorine.sites.acs.org/meetings.htm).

More recently he devoted his attention to crystal engineering and he developed the concept of halogen bonding, the interaction where halogen atoms work as electrophilic sites. This interaction is becoming a first choice tool in all fields where molecular recognition and self-assembly play a key-role. The seminal role of Prof. Resnati’s results in the field is emblematically declared by the fact that he published his first paper in the field in 1998 (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1998, 120, 8261) and according to ISI – Web of Knowledge, in the fourteen year of the period 1998-2012, the papers with the words “halogen bonding” in the title are 575, the first, second, sixth, and seventh most cited papers being from Prof. Resnati. A further recognition of the importance of the field and the leading role of Prof. Resnati is that he has been appointed as Chairman (along with Prof. Pierangelo Metrangolo) of an IUPAC project aimed at defining the term “halogen bonding” (http://www.iupac.org/home/projects/project-db/project-details.html?tx_wfqbe_pi1%5bproject_nr%5d=2009-032-1-100).

Full list of papers (from 1990), patents and other results of the research group of Prof. Resnati:
http://nfmlab.chem.polimi.it.

h-index: 39 (ISI Web of Science, at 06-03-2012)
Citations in 2009, 2010, 2011 (ISI Web of Science, at 06-03-2012): 655, 723, 874