Invited Speakers

• Conférences plénières

Yves GEERTS 

Spin-Induced Absolute Asymmetric Synthesis 

Biography

Yves Geerts studied chemistry at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and did his master thesis under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Sauvage. After a PhD thesis at ULB, he went for a postdoc with Klaus Müllen at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research and for another one at MIT in the group of Richard Schrock. Since 1999, he is professor of chemistry and the head of the Laboratory of Polymer Chemistry. Soon after, he started to be active at the European level with the coordination of FP5-DISCEL (2001-2004), FP6-NAIMO (2004-2008), FP7-ONE-P project (2009-2011), MSCA UHMob (2019-2023), and MSCA CISSE (2023-2026). His scientific interests include the design, the synthesis and the characterization of novel organic materials to study spin, charge, and heat transport, as well as non-equilibrium phenomena and chiral symmetry breaking. Yves Geerts has recently been appointed Director of the Solvay Institute for Chemistry. 

Alexander Kuhn

Chiral Electrochemistry:

from Molecules to Materials and Back

Biography

Alexander Kuhn obtained his Master degree in chemistry from the Technical University Munich (1991), and his PhD from the University of Bordeaux (1994). After his post-doc at Caltech (1996), he was appointed in the same year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Bordeaux and then in 2000 as a Full Professor, working at the Institut of Molecular Science (University Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP). Since 2015 he is also Adjunct Professor at VISTEC, Thailand, and more recently (2020) Distinguished Professor of the “Outstanding Talent Program” at Henan University, China. He is a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, distinguished senior member of the French Chemical Society and Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry. He is the recepient of several honors, including a fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation, the Grand Prix Süe of the French Chemical Society and the science medal in silver of CNRS. 

Alexander Kuhn
Jacques Maddaluno

• Conférences Clés

Elizabeth Hillard

Recent investigations in X-ray natural optical activity

Biography 

Elizabeth Hillard is a CNRS Research Director affiliated with the Switchable Molecules and Materials Group at the Chemistry of Condensed Matter Institute of Bordeaux. Her research investigates chiral paramagnetic coordination complexes, mainly in the solid state, focusing on circular dichroism (CD), magnetochiral dichroism (MChD), and X-ray natural circular dichroism (XNCD). She currently coordinates two ANR collaborative projects: XIMTEX (2022–2026), exploring microscopic theories of XNCD, and MaChiNaCo (2020–2026), on induced MChD in chiral nano-objects. Dr. Hillard earned her PhD at Texas A&M under F. Albert Cotton and completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Chimie ParisTech. She received her Habilitation from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in 2010. Through collaborations with the ESRF and SOLEIL synchrotrons, as well as several French labs, her work aims to uncover how electronic and chiral structure shape the intensity of chiro-optical responses across energy ranges from infrared to X-ray.

Laure Guy