Ernest Solvay Prize

Sven Lidin, president of the Ernest Solvay Prize jury, Professor of inorganic chemistry at Lund University

Sven Lidin is a Swedish chemist and Professor of inorganic chemistry at Lund University.

Sven Lidin's research work has mainly taken place in materials science. He has studied minimal surfaces, to explain chemical phenomena, and determined the structure of complex and unusual crystalline, so-called inorganic substances.

Sven Lidin defended his dissertation in 1990 at Lund University. During the years 1990-1991, Lidin was a Post-doc at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany. He has been appointed Associate Professor at Lund University in 1991. In 1996, he became Professor of inorganic chemistry at Stockholm University. In 1997 he was awarded the Göran Gustavsson Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1999 the Norblad Ekstrand Medal by the Swedish Chemical Society.

Lidin is an active researcher at the Center for Analysis and Synthesis at the Department of Chemistry, Lund University.

Sven Lidin has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2002 in the class for chemistry and a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry since 2003. In 2010 he was elected to both the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund and the Swedish Academy of Engineering.

Sven Lidin has also taken on a number of assignments in society and business. He is a member of the boards of the technology company X-Brane AB and sits on SPAGO Imaging AB's scientific council.

At the Nobel Prize ceremony on December 10, 2011, Lidin gave the presentation speech of this year's winners in chemistry.

Donna G Blackmond is a Professor of Chemistry and the John C. Martin Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, USA. Donna Blackmond received a PhD in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. She has held professorships in chemistry and in chemical engineering in the US, Germany, and the UK, and she has worked in pharmaceutical research and development. She holds joint US/UK citizenship.

Prof. Blackmond is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK and is an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Donna Blackmond has been recognized internationally for her research including the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award and the James Flack Norris Award in physical organic chemistry from the American Chemical Society, the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, the Centenary Prize for Communication in Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Award for Outstanding Women Scientists, the Humboldt- Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the IUPAC Award for Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering.

Prof. Blackmond’s research focuses on the kinetics of organic reactions and on physical and chemical models for the origin of biological homochirality. She has been invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to speak at two Nobel Workshops, “On the Origin of Life” (2006) and “Chiral Matter” (2021). She pioneered the methodology of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA) and Temperature Scanning Reactions (TSR) for fundamental mechanistic studies of complex catalytic organic reactions, including asymmetric catalysis.

Steven Chu, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, former U.S. Secretary of Energy.

Steven Chu is a physicist and US politician.

Steven Chu received his bachelor's degree in 1970 from the University of Rochester and his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976, then remained two years at Berkeley as a post-doctoral researcher before joining the Bell laboratories. It is in these laboratories that he and his team worked on laser cooling of atoms.

He is co-laureate with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips of the Nobel Prize in Physics of 1997 "for the development of methods used to cool and confine atoms using laser light". He left Bell Laboratories in 1987 to become professor of physics at Stanford University, where he headed the physics department from 1990 to 1993 and from 1999 to 2001. He was hired as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004. Since 2020, he is Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris.

On January 20, 2009, Steven Chu was appointed United States Secretary of Energy in President Barack Obama's administration. He was in charge of the application of the ecological and energy program desired by President Obama, himself being a supporter of renewable energies. The 1st June 2009, he announced the creation of a fund of US $ 256 million to improve the energy efficiency of major industries in the United States. He did not want to be reappointed during the second term of the Obama administration and left his post in 2013. Steven Chu then became Professor at Stanford University again.

Chu's research has focused primarily on atomic physics by developing methods to cool and capture atoms using lasers. While at Stanford, his research extended to polymer physics and biophysics.

Chu along with three other professors launched the Bio-X program, an interdisciplinary approach to biology and medicine.

Ben Feringa, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2016, Professor at the University of Groningen, a former recipient of the 2015 Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize.

Bernard Lucas Feringa is a Dutch chemist who won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which he obtained for his work with Jean-Pierre Sauvage and James Fraser Stoddart on the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

Ben Feringa obtained a doctorate in 1978 entitled "Asymmetric oxidation of phenols. Atropisomerism and optical activity" at the University of Groningen under the supervision of Professor Hans Wijnberg. After a short period at Shell in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, he was appointed Professor at the University of Groningen in 1984 (Lecturer) then Full Professor, succeeding Professor Wijnberg, in 1988. The beginning of his career was focused on homogeneous catalysis and catalic oxidations, focusing in particular on stereochemistry with major contributions in the field of enantioselective catalysis, including monophos ligands used in asymmetric hydrogenations, the additions conjugated asymmetric reactive organometallic, including with organolithium highly reactive, the photochemistry organic and stereochemistry. In the 1990s, Ben Feringa's work in stereochemistry led to major contributions in photochemistry, producing the first molecular rotary motor started by monodirectional light and later a molecular car, known as nano car, driven by electrical impulses.

Ben Feringa holds more than 30 patents and published more than 650 articles in peer-reviewed journals in 2016, he is cited over 30,000 times and has an h index of over 90. He has supervised over 100 doctoral students during his career.

Laura Gagliardi is the Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor in the Department of Chemistry, with joint appointments in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the James Franck Institute.

Prof. Gagliardi became an assistant professor at the University of Palermo in 2002. In 2005, she became associate professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She joined the University of Minnesota as a professor of chemistry in 2009, was appointed as Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2014, and was awarded a McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in 2018.  In 2020, she transitioned to the University of Chicago, assuming the Richard and Kathy Leventhal professorship in chemistry and molecular engineering. She has also been serving as the director of two DOE-funded Energy Frontier Research Centers on catalysis.

Prof. Gagliardi is a theoretical quantum chemist who has made significant contributions to the advancement of electronic structure methods and their application in elucidating complex chemical systems. Alongside her research group, she focuses on the development of theories and methods tailored for quantum computing. Her overarching research objectives revolve around the utilization of cutting-edge theoretical approaches to investigate energy-related chemical systems and materials.

Gagliardi has received numerous prestigious accolades and recognitions from the chemistry community. Some of her notable achievements include the Syensqo Chair in Chemistry (2025), the Pauling Medal of the American Chemical Society (2023), the Kavli Innovations in Chemistry Lecture (2022), the Faraday Lectureship Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2021) and the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (2020), among others. 

Furthermore, Gagliardi holds memberships in esteemed scientific academies, including the USA National Academy of Sciences (2021), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2022), the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2021), Academia Europaea (2018).

Additionally, Gagliardi serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the ACS Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, which is a leading journal in the field of theoretical chemistry.

Susumu Kitagawa, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2025, professor at Kyoto University, a former recipient of the 2017 Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize, 

Susumu Kitagawa is a Japanese chemist working in the field of coordination chemistry, with a specific focus on the chemistry of organic–inorganic hybrid compounds, as well as chemical and physical properties of porous coordination polymers and metal-organic frameworks in particular. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at Kyoto University, in the Institute for Integrated Cell–Material Sciences, of which he is co-founder and current director.

From 1975 to 1979, Professor Kitagawa pursued and obtained a PhD degree in hydrocarbon chemistry, at Kyoto University, where he had previously done his undergraduate studies. He was appointed in 1979 at Kindai University as Assistant Professor, promoted first to Lecturer in 1983, and in 1988 to Associate Professor. In 1992, he became Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University and in 1998 Professor of Inorganic Functional Chemistry at the University of Kyoto, in the Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry. In 2007 he co-founded the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences and was named Deputy Director. Since 2013 he is the Director of the Institute.

He is a pioneer and leading scientist in the field of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a new class of nanoporous materials. MOFs look like small cages made from networks of metallic knots linked by organic molecules. The “holes” in the network are much, much smaller than the diameter of a single human hair and can capture gases like CO2, methane or hydrogen with the purpose of re-using them for applications in chemistry or energy. The cage size can be adapted to the type of gas to be captured.

The 2017 Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize has been awarded to Professor Susumu Kitagawa for his work in developing metal-organic frameworks, a new class of materials with a range of potential future applications, including the capturing of polluting gases.

Full Professor in the Chemistry Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).

She is the scientific secretary of the international scientific committee for chemistry of the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry.

Past CSO of Solvay, 

Member of the Académie des Technologies in France, he was at the origin of the creation of several joint teams between Solvay, CNRS, and universities worldwide.