Premios GEQO 2017

Prof. Miguel A. Esteruelas was born in Zaragoza and grew up in La Zaida, a small village situated on the banks of the Ebro. He attended University of Zaragoza where received his Diploma in Chemistry in 1981 and carried out the doctoral work in organometallics at University of Zaragoza. After getting the Ph. D. degree in December 1983, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Helmut Werner at the University of Würzburg, for eighteen months. In 1985, Esteruelas returned to the University of Zaragoza where was promoted to Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in 1988 and to Distinguished Professor in 2003. In 2007, he moved to the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), where is currently Research Professor at the Instituto de Síntesis Química y Catálisis Homogénea (ISQCH). Esteruelas’ research group focuses its interest on mechanistic, synthetic, and structural organometallic chemistry. Emphasis has been placed on the use of transition metal hydride complexes for the activation of σ-bonds, the generation of metal-carbon multiple bonds, and the catalytic formation of carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bonds. Prof. Esteruales has co-authored more than 350 publications in international chemistry journals (23 JACS, 5 Angewandte Chem. Int. Ed., 204 Organometallics, etc.). In 2001 he received the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry award for research in Inorganic Chemistry.

Prof. M. Concepción Gimeno received undergraduate education in Chemistry at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and obtained the PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Rafael Usón and Prof. Antonio Laguna from the University of Zaragoza in 1988. After her postdoctoral work with Prof. F. Gordon A. Stone at the University of Bristol, she joined the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in 1990 as Tenured Scientist, in the Institute of Chemical Synthesis and Homogeneous Catalysis (CSIC-University of Zaragoza). In 2000 she promoted to Research Scientist and later in 2008 to Research Professor. Her research interests focus on the design and synthesis of coordination compounds, mainly of group 11 metals, with specific properties for various applications, including luminescence, medicine or catalysis. She is author of more than 230 scientific publications (24 in Organometallics) among articles, reviews, and book chapters, and a licensed patent under exploitation, which received more than 4700 citations (h-index 36). She is editor of the Gold Bulletin and Member of the Advisory Board of European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry. She was recently awarded the IUPAC-2017 Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical engineering.

Dr. José Antonio García López was born in Jumilla (Spain) in 1981. He studied his BSc in Chemistry at the University of Murcia, where he reveived his PhD in 2010, working on the synthesis and reactivity of C,N-palladacycles arising from primary amines, under the supervison of Profs. José Vicente and Isabel Saura. In october 2012 he moved to the University of Manchester (U.K.) to join the group of Prof. Michael F. Greaney as a post-doctoral fellow. During this period he worked in different research topics such as benzyne chemistry and transition-metal catalysis. In 2015 he was awarded a postdotoral fellowship to reincorporate to the Group of Organometallic Chemistry at the University of Murcia. His current interests focus in 1) the development of new transition-metal catalyzed cascade or multicomponent reactions and new synthetic methodologies involving C–H activation processes, and 2) the isolation of organometallic intermediates involved in these catalytic reactions. He is co-author of 22 publications (12 of them in Organometallics).