Guy Bertrand Wins Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award

May 11, 2016

Guy Bertrand, a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, has been named this year’s winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award.

Bertrand received the award for “for his discovery of stable carbenes and their applications in organometallic synthesis and catalysis.”

Bertrand studied chemistry at the National School of Chemistry in Montpellier and received his PhD from the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. After being a CNRS group leader (French National Center for Scientific Research) at the University of Toulouse, and then at the Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination du CNRS, he served as director of the Laboratoire d'Hétérochimie Fondamentale et Appliquée at the University Paul Sabatier from 1998 to 2005.

From 2001 to 2012 he also was director of the UCR/CNRS Joint Research Chemistry Laboratory that he created and since arriving on the La Jolla campus in 2012, he has been the director of UCSD/CNRS Joint Research Chemistry Laboratory.

Bertrand is a member of the French Academy of Technology (2000), the Academia Europaea (2002), the European Academy of Sciences (2003), the French Academy of Sciences (2004) and is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Sciences (2006). He has recently received the Sir Ronald Nyholm Medal of the RSC (2009), the Grand Prix Le Bel of the French Chemical Society (2010) and the American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry (2014).

He is one of the associate editors of Chemical Reviews and serves as a member of the editorial board of several professional journals, including the Royal Society’s Chemical Science and Organic Chemistry Frontiers.