ISCR 2024 conferences - Professor Bert Meijer, CNRS Ambassador

The CNRS Chimie has launched the "Ambassadors" program, a unique program that allows to invite prestigious scientists based abroad for a lecture tour in CNRS laboratories.
In this context, the Rennes Institute of Chemical Sciences (ISCR) is pleased to welcome in Rennes Professor Bert Meijer, Institute for Complex Molecular Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
Traditional Dutch windmills are all turn left-handed and the reason is based on a molecular phenomenon. This simple example illustrates the many challenges of studying chirality at all length scales. With the pioneering contributions of Jean-Baptiste Biot and Louis Pasteur, the concepts of optical activity and chirality emerged. This was explained by the concept of stereocenters by Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel in two independent publications in 1874. Since then, questions about why and how nature could become homochiral, how can we arrive at enantiomerically pure molecules, how chirality at all length scales can be explained, and many more have been and will be of great interest to almost every chemist. The lecture will cover various stereochemical challenges and some of my own favorite questions will be presented. Some examples of the smallest deviation for breaking symmetry will be given of research that started in 1978 and runs until today (see figure). It will be combined on how it is possible to amplify local asymmetry to macroscopic objects. Supramolecular polymers is a research field by excellence to study many of these stereochemical challenges and, at the same time, their optical activity is used to arrive at a detailed molecular understanding of their structure and formation. Chiral molecular systems are receiving increasing attention for exploiting their specific opto-electronic properties and some of them will be discussed, ranging from chiral OLEDs, Second Harmonic Generation and the CISS effect. ...

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Contact
Jeanne Crassous, Univ Rennes, ISCR-CNRS UMR 6226, F-35000 Rennes, France
[email protected]