Sauvage | Inorganic chemistry

Jean-Pierre Sauvage is a French chemist working in the field of coordination chemistry. He is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure de chimie de Strasbourg (now ECPM Strasbourg). He has made a major contribution to the development of molecular machines. He is co-recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with James Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa.

He obtained his doctorate at the Université Louis-Pasteur (Strasbourg I) under the supervision of Jean-Marie Lehn, himself a 1987 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. During his doctoral thesis, he developed the first synthesis of cryptandligands. Following a post-doctorate with Malcolm L. H. Green in Oxford from 1973 to 1974, he became a professor at the University of Strasbourg in 2016 after conducting research at the CNRS from 1971 to 2014.

Jean-Pierre Sauvage's scientific work focuses on the creation of molecules that mimic machine functions by changing their conformation in response to an external signal (addition of energy). He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work conducted in 1983 when he was the first to synthesise a catenane, a molecule consisting of two interpenetrating molecular rings that are more mechanically than chemically linked.

Another of J.-P. Sauvage's research themes concerns the electrochemical reduction of CO2 and models of the photosynthetic reaction centre. A large part of his work concerns molecular topology and especially mechanically entangled molecular architectures. He has also described syntheses of catenanes and molecular knots based on coordination complexes10.

He was elected a corresponding member of the Académie française des sciences on 28 March 1990 and a full member on 24 November 1997.

 See also his Wikipedia page