Tobias Ritter, Harvard University, USA, will be awarded the BASF Catalysis Award today in Heidelberg, Germany. The award celebrates the importance of catalysis in industrial synthesis and is presented biannually to an outstanding young researcher in this field. It is endowed with a prize of 10,000 EUR.
Tobias Ritter was born in 1975 in Lübeck, Germany. He studied chemistry in Braunschweig, Germany, Bordeaux, France, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Stanford, USA, and received a master of science from Braunschweig University in 1999. He then pursued his Ph.D. with E. M. Carreira at the ETH Zürich, Switerland. This was followed by post-doctoral research with R. H. Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology, USA. In 2006, Ritter was appointed as Assistant Professor at Harvard University, USA, and promoted to Associate Professor in 2010.
His research centers on synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry, including complex molecule synthesis, and mechanistic studies to develop practical access to molecules of interest in catalysis, medicine, and materials. His current focus is on fluorination chemistry under mild conditions of complex natural and unnatural products.
