The German Chemical Society (German: Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) is a learned society and professional association founded in 1949 to represent the interests of German chemists in local, national and international contexts. GDCh "brings together people working in chemistry and the molecular sciences and supports their striving for positive, sustainable scientific advance – for the good of humankind and the environment, and a future worth living for."[1]
The earliest precursor of today's GDCh was the German Chemical Society (Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft zu Berlin, DChG). Adolf von Baeyer was prominent among the German chemists who established DChG in 1867; and August Wilhelm von Hofmann was the first president.[1] This society was modeled after the British Chemical Society, which was the precursor of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Like its British counterpart, DChG sought to foster the communication of new ideas and facts throughout Germany and across international borders.[2]
In 1946, the current organization was created by a merger of the German Chemical Society (DChG) and the Association of German Chemists (Verein Deutscher Chemiker, VDCh).
In the 21st century, the society has become a member of ChemPubSoc Europe, which is an organization of 16 European chemical societies. This European consortium was established in the late 1990s as many chemical journals owned by national chemical societies were amalgamated.[6]
Prizes and awards
The society acknowledges individual achievement with prizes and awards, including medals originally conferred by the predecessor organizations DChG and VDCh:
Richard Johann Kuhn was an Austrian-German biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938 "for his work on carotenoids and vitamins".
Werner Kutzelnigg was a prominent Austrian-born theoretical chemist and professor in the Chemistry Faculty, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Kutzelnigg was born in Vienna. His most significant contributions were in the following fields: relativistic quantum chemistry, coupled cluster methods, theoretical calculation of NMR chemical shifts, explicitly correlated wavefunctions. He was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
François Diederich was a Luxembourgian chemist specializing in organic chemistry.
The Alfred-Stock Memorial Prize or Alfred-Stock-Gedächtnispreis is an award for "an outstanding independent scientific experimental investigation in the field of inorganic chemistry." It is awarded biennially by the German Chemical Society. The award, consisting of a gold medal and money, was created in 1950 in recognition of the pioneering achievements in inorganic chemistry by the German chemist Alfred Stock. In 2022, the GDCh board decided to change the name of the previous Alfred Stock Memorial Prize. The new name is Marianne Baudler Prize.
The Liebig Medal was established by the Association of German Chemists in 1903 to celebrate the centenary of Justus von Liebig. Since 1946 it has been awarded by the Society of German Chemists.
Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann was a prominent Baltic German chemist-physicist who made important contributions in the fields of glassy and solid solutions, heterogeneous equilibria, crystallization, and metallurgy.
The Société Chimique de France (SCF) is a learned society and professional association founded in 1857 to represent the interests of French chemists in a variety of ways in local, national and international contexts. Until 2009 the organization was known as the Société Française de Chimie.
Horst Prinzbach was a German chemist and professor emeritus.
Chemistry Europe is an organization of 16 chemical societies from 15 European countries, representing over 75,000 chemists. It publishes a family of academic chemistry journals, covering a broad range of disciplines.
Véronique Gouverneur is the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Prior to the Waynflete professorship, she held a tutorial fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. Her research on fluorine chemistry has received many professional and scholarly awards.
Margot Becke-Goehring was a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg and she was the first female rector of a university in West Germany - the Heidelberg University. She was also the director of the Gmelin Institute of Inorganic Chemistry of the Max Planck Society that edited the Gmelins Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie. She studied Chemistry in Halle (Saale) and Munich, and she finished her doctorate and habilitation at the University of Halle. For her research on the chemistry of main-group elements, she was awarded Alfred Stock Memorial Prize. One of her most notable contributions to inorganic chemistry was her work on the synthesis and structure of poly(sulfur nitride), which was later discovered to be the first non-metallic superconductor. For her success in editing the Gmelins Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie, she received the Gmelin-Beilstein memorial coin.
Horst Kessler is a German chemist and emeritus Professor of Excellence at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Kessler works in the area of bioorganic chemistry, in particular peptide synthesis, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He also made contributions to magnetic resonance imaging.
Brigitte Voit is a German chemist and professor of chemistry. She holds the chair Organic Chemistry of Polymers at the Faculty of Chemistry of the TU Dresden and is head of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research in Dresden. From September 1, 2002, to July 31, 2022, she was also member of the Board of Management/CSO of the IPF Dresden.
Peter Richard Schreiner is a German chemist who is a professor at Justus Liebig University Giessen. As of 2022, his h-index is 73.
Wilhelm Karl Klemm was an inorganic and physical chemist. Klemm did extensive work on intermetallic compounds, rare earth metals, transition elements and compounds involving oxygen and fluorine. He and Heinrich Bommer were the first to isolate elemental erbium (1934) and ytterbium (1936). Klemm refined Eduard Zintl's ideas about the structure of intermetallic compounds and their connections to develop the Zintl-Klemm concept.
Arndt Simon is a German inorganic chemist. He was a director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
Rainer Haag is a German chemist and Chair Professor of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry at the Free University of Berlin. He conducts research together with his working group on preventing aggressive pathogens and viruses from entering the body's cells using nanotechnology. He heads a team composed of biochemists, physicians, biologists and physicists.
Olga García Mancheño is an organic chemistry professor at the University of Münster in Germany. García Mancheño directs an organic chemistry research group at University of Münster that focuses on development of new catalytic methods with the goal of developing sustainable synthetic routes to accomplish carbon-hydrogen functionalization, organic chemical rearrangements, and photocatalyzed chemical reactions.
The Hermann Staudinger Prize is awarded by the German Chemical Society for groundbreaking work in the field of macromolecular chemistry and polymer science. It comes with a gold medal and a sum of money. It is awarded in even-numbered years and is named after the Nobel Prize in chemistry winner Hermann Staudinger, who is the founder of the field. The prize started in 1970 through donation from BASF and the first prize was handed out in 1971.
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