Plenary Speakers

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1986
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Prize motivation: "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes."
Yuan Tseh Lee (Born in 1936) is a Taiwanese chemist and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".
Lee's particular physical chemistry work was related to the use of advanced chemical kinetics techniques to investigate and manipulate the behavior of chemical reactions using crossed molecular beams. From 15 January 1994 to 19 October 2006, Lee served as the President of the Academia Sinica of Taiwan. In 2011, he was elected head of the International Council for Science.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010
Affiliation at the time of the award: Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Prize motivation: "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis."
Akira, Suzuki (Born in 1930), is Japanese organic chemist. Suzuki was one of the recipients of Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010, with Richard Heck and Ei-ichi Negishi for their research during the 1960s and 70s on palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions in organic synthesis. Their work, carried out independently, laid the foundation for the synthesis of chemicals for uses in such areas as pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, and advanced technological materials.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016
Affiliation at the time of the award: Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Prize motivation: "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines."
Sir James Fraser (born in 1942) is a Scottish chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilizing molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches. His group has even applied these structures in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). His efforts have been recognized by numerous awards including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

Vice-Chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Chairman of the Ural Branch of the RAS
Director of I. Postovsky Institute of Organic Synthesis
Prof. Dr. Valery Charushin was born in 1951 in a small settlement near Ekaterinburg, which is located just on the border between European and Asian parts of Russia (the Urals Region). After graduating the Urals State Technical University (USTU) in 1973, he joined the Organic Chemistry Department of USTU as a post-graduate student. In 1976 he maintained the thesis “Reactions of azinium cations with aromatic nucleophiles” under the guidance of Prof. Oleg N. Chupakhin and got the degree «Candidate of Chemical Sciences» (similar to Ph.D). During the next 10 years he has been doing a research work at the Department of Organic Chemistry of the Urals State Technical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia), and also in Agricultural University of Wageningen (the Netherlands) (1981-1982, 1988) where he worked under the guidance of Prof. H.C. van der Plas. In 1987 he maintained his doctoral dissertation “Reactions of azines with bifunctional nucleophiles”, got the degree “Doctor of Chemical Sciences”, enabling him to get the position of a Full Professor of Organic Chemistry in USTU.

9th President of the Academia Sinica
Chi-Huey Wong is a Taiwanese-born American biochemist. He is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan . His expertise is bioorganic and synthetic chemistry, especially in carbohydrate chemistry and chemical biology.
He was elected as a member of Taiwan's Academia Sinica in 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1996, United States National Academy of Science in 2002.