Biography

Pierre Miquel — 2016-11-27T10:31:19Z

Gérard Férey was successively Professor at Le Mans University (1967-1988 and 1992-1995), then deputy Director of the Chemistry Department of CNRS (1988-1992) before creating the Institut Lavoisier at the new University of Versailles, on demand of CNRS and Ministery of Education.

He was nominated as Professor at the Institut universitaire de France in 1999. His fields of research concerned first the magnetic frustration of 3d transition metal fluorides (Le Mans) and then, in Versailles, inorganic and hybrid micro- and mesoporous solids for dedicated applications in the domains of energy, energy savings, sustainable development and health.

Member of Academia Europaea (1994), of the French Academy of Sciences (2003), of the National Indian Academy of Sciences (2001) and of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain (2009), he has received many international awards

Grand Prix IFP of the French Academy,
A. von Humboldt Award (Germany (2004)),
C.N.R. Rao Prize (India (2005)),
Award Lecture of the Chemical Society of Japan (2008),
the Catalan-Sabatier Award of the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (2008),
three Award Lectures from American universities (AT&M [2007], Arizona State [2008] and UCLA Berkeley [2009]),
and the famous ENI Award for the Protection of Environment (Italy, 2009).

He received the Gold Medal of CNRS in 2010 and is the laureate of the Davison Award of the MIT for 2013.

He is the author of more than 600 publications and of delivered numerous plenary lectures in international symposia.

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Pierre Miquel — 2016-11-25T15:20:05Z

Since 1992, Gérard Férey has devoted the last part of his scientific career to the genesis, the structures, some mechanisms of formation, as well as the properties and applications of porous solids, either with an inorganic or a hybrid organic-inorganic framework, in order to reach rationally ‘tailor-made' materials, through an integrated strategy.

More than 150 new structural types resulted from this approach, with useful pore dimensions ranging from 8 to 50 Å. A careful choice of the metals of the precursors made that most of them are thermally stable (up to 600°C) and resistant to humidity, two criteria needed for eventual applications coupled with reactions performed in water.

Based on the concept of secondary building units (SBU), the elucidation of their mechanism of formation used many complementary in situ techniques (NMR, diffraction, EXAFS...) for following the steps of the reaction within autoclaves (ca. 200°C, autogenous pressure).

Whatever the nature of the framework (inorganic or hybrid), the time-resolved identification of the reactive species (strongly dependent on pH) shed some light on the formation of the solid from the solution. The main hitherto unknown result was to show that the polynuclear SBU units, which describe the final solid, already exist in the solution before precipitation, after one or several identified steps.

From the observed invariance of these SBU, an original computer simulation of their 3D associations was successfully performed for predicting the various possible structures based on these SBU.

This even now unique strategy led to predict the first crystallized mesoporous solids MIL-100 and -101 before their ‘tailor made' isolation. This pioneer approach was particularly successful for metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) (Férey was one of its few pioneers) and where he showed the richness of this family. In particular, he showed that a lot of metals, with various oxidation states, can be incorporated after a much more difficult chemistry in the framework, for introducing for the fisrt time physical properties, usually encountered in dense phases.

Gérard Férey

Biography

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