Matthias Beller

Matthias Beller, born 1962 in Gudensberg (Germany), studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he completed his PhD thesis in 1989 in the group of L.-F. Tietze. As recipient of a Liebig scholarship, he then spent a one-year with K. B. Sharpless at MIT, USA. From 1991 to 1995, Beller worked in industry. Then, he moved to the Technical University of München as Professor for Inorganic Chemistry. In 1998, he relocated to Rostock to head the Institute for Organic Catalysis, which became in 2006 the Leibniz-Institute for Catalysis. The work of his group has been published in nearly 1150 original publications, reviews and >150 patent applications have been filed (H-index: 154). Since 2016, he is a “Highly Cited Researcher” (among the top 1% of researchers with most cited documents in a specific field).

He has received a number of awards including the Otto-Roelen Medal and the Leibniz-Price of the DFG. In 2006, he was also awarded “Entrepreneur of the Year” of Rostock and he received the German Federal Cross of Merit. Since then, he received the first “European price for Sustainable Chemistry”, the “Paul-Rylander Award” of the Organic Reaction Catalysis Society of the USA, the Gay-Lussac-Alexander-von-Humboldt-Prize of the French Academy of Sciences and the Emil Fischer Medal of the German Chemical Society. In 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium and received the Wöhler price for Sustainable Chemistry from the German Chemical Society as well as an ERC Advanced grant from the European Commission. In March 2016, he received the honorary doctorate of the University of Rennes 1.

In 2017, Matthias Beller has received the Karl Ziegler Prize from GDCh, (German Chemical Society) and the Karl Ziegler Foundation – the award is one of the highest honors in the field of chemistry in Germany – and he was awarded as the first European chemist with the ACS Catalysis Award Lectureship. Most recently, he was selected as the prestigious “Hassel Lecturer 2018” from the University of Oslo, Norway and for the “Gordon Stone Lectureship” of the University of Bristol, UK.
In 2022, he was awarded the Luigi Sacconi Medal 2022 of the Italian Chemical Society

Matthias Beller is Vice President of the Leibniz Society – one of the major science organizations in Germany and a member of the German National Academia of Science “Leopoldina” and three other Academies of Sciences.

Catalysis for a Sustainable Society and Circular Economy

The sufficient and sustainable supply of energy remains one if not the most important challenge for our future. In the coming years it will be vital to develop efficient processes to interconvert renewable energy sources to chemical energy. In this respect, the talk will present different technological concepts to achieve this goal with the help of new catalysts. Specifically, the role of carbon dioxide in a sustainable chemical industry will be discussed. Furthermore, several examples for the cost-effective and waste-free synthesis of industrially relevant materials, life science goods and other kinds of organic products using innovative catalysts will be presented. Here, it will be shown how new and improved homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts can be developed by learning from each other. Specifically, the phenomenon of cooperative catalysis will be addressed in the context of non-noble metal-based catalysts.

In detail, it will be demonstrated that recently developed molecular-defined as well as nano-structured cobalt and iron catalysts enable catalytic (de)hydrogenation processes with high yields and unprecedented selectivity. Examples which demonstrate the potential of such catalytic processes with bio-relevant metal complexes compared to more traditional catalytic reactions will also include reactions for energy technologies.

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