On November 21, 2017 Marc Taillefer was presented with the Grand Prix Emile Jungfleisch of the French Academy of Sciences, under the dome of the Institut de France.

Marc Taillefer is a CNRS senior researcher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier and executive vice-president of the French Chemical Society.

He is also head of the AM2N (Molecular Architectures and Nanostructured Materials) group in the Institute Charles Gerhardt of Montpellier, which is part of the Chimie Balard Cirimat Carnot Institute.

Solemn ceremony for the Grand Prix Emile Jungfleisch 2017 at the French Academy of Sciences

The French Academy of Sciences awarded the Grand Prix Emile Jungfleisch to Marc Taillefer during the opening ceremony of its awards session on November 21, 2017.

Created in 1923 and elevated to the level of Grand Prize in 2007, this distinction recognises a scientist working in organic chemistry or biochemistry whose research was carried out in a French laboratory.

This award recognises the importance of the “concept of soft arylation with copper” for academic and industrial research 

Marc Taillefer was awarded this prestigious prize for his work at the forefront of the field of organic synthetic methodology.

He is known in particular for a major academic breakthrough, the arylation of nucleophiles using catalytic systems composed of copper associated with simple polyvalent ligands.

This concept of soft arylation with copper has far-reaching implications.

Employed by numerous pharmaceutical companies throughout the world, it allows for the synthesis of chemical motifs present in about 70% of all medications, under soft conditions that are clean and economically competitive.

“Avalanche” is the term now used to describe the flood of academic and industrial works resulting from this discovery.