Stratingh Prize 2015

On Thursday March 24^th, the winner of the Strating Award for the best-written colloquium of 2015 was announced. After an introduction on the history of this prestigious prize by Prof Jan Engberts, the three nominees that were selected by the selection committee were announced. The committee consisting of 2 staff members (Martin Witte and Marthe Walvoort) and 2 PhD students (Dowine de Bruijn and Luuk Kortekaas) ranked the colloquia on criteria like critical analysis and clarity of writing.

The prize for the third place went to Federico Lancia with his colloquium entitled

“Droplets of liquid crystals as building blocks for soft photonics” . His colloquium described in detail the current advances in this field. The runner up of this year Strating Award was Giedrius Zolubas, who described in his colloquium “Meta C-H functionalization using base-templated approach” the innovative methods that are being developed for meta-functionalization of monosubstituted arenes. The winner of this years Strating Award, Ramon van der Vlag, described in his colloquium the upcoming field of gold(III) calatysis. The most important advances and problems that need to be tackled by the field as well as future application were presented in attractive and very clear manner. The title of the winning colloquium by Ramon van der Vlag is: “The organometallic chemistry of Au(III)”. The award ceremony was followed by coffee and cake for the members of the Stratingh Institute and a lunch for the members of H.J. Backer foundation, the selection committee and of course the winner of the Strating prize.