24. April 2012: Award for the best presentation
At this year’s meeting of coordination chemists, Evonik Foundation scholarship holder Boris Burger was awarded a prize for the best presentation. He had presented selected results from his doctoral research to an audience of 200 chemists, titled “The Carboxylate Shift and the Carboxylate Twist: Unusual Dynamics at Pyrazolate-Based Bioinspired Diiron Sites.” Boris Burger obtained his doctorate summa cum laude from Georg-August-University Göttingen in December 2011.
In his talk, Burger described unusual dynamic effects in solids that he and his colleagues were able to demonstrate for the first time in diiron complexes. These effects emulate for the first time in a synthetic model compound carboxylate dynamics that have often been postulated, but never definitively experimentally proven, in iron-containing enzymes. It is assumed that these dynamic effects represent the basis for iron-based oxidation chemistry in enzymes.
The conference, which took place this year at TU Dortmund, is Germany’s largest meeting of coordination chemists. As in previous years, a number of promising young scientists presented the highlights of their current research. The topics covered in the talks and posters ranged from pure coordination chemistry, organometallic chemistry, and solid-state chemistry, through bioinorganic chemistry and catalysis, to polymer chemistry and magnetochemistry.
“It was a pleasure to present my results to German experts in coordination chemistry and to respond to the questions of the audience,” says Boris Burger. “I was pleased to have been awarded the prize for the best presentation but also surprised, because there were really so many fascinating talks presenting excellent results.” The award was sponsored by the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry and presented by its editor, Dr. Karen Hindson.