Michael Lappert

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Franz Lappert (born December 31, 1928 in Czechoslovakia ; † March 28, 2014 ) was a British chemist and professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Sussex .

Life

Lappert came to England with his brother in 1939 with the Kindertransport . The parents died in the Auschwitz concentration camp and he was raised in London by an aunt who had also fled the Nazis. He received his doctorate in 1951 from Northern Polytechnic (now London Metropolic University) in London under William Gerrard , where he was lecturer since 1953 and senior lecturer in 1957. In 1959 he became a lecturer at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and in 1964 a reader at the newly founded University of Sussex, where he became a professor in 1969. At the University of Sussex he set up a leading international center for organometallic chemistry and supervised over 100 doctoral students. He died after falling while playing tennis.

He dealt with organometallic chemistry, especially organic boron compounds and metal-amide complexes. He succeeded in stabilizing the very reactive carbenes with metal complexes, which made their use as catalysts in petrochemicals possible. He published over 800 scientific papers.

In 2008 he received the Alfred Stock Memorial Prize . In 1979 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1976 he received the Kipping Award and he has received various awards from the Royal Society of Chemistry (Main Group Element Award 1970, Tilden Lecture 1972, Award for Organometallic Chemistry 1978, Nyholm Lecture 1994, Sir Edward Frankland Lecture 1999). From 1989 to 1991 he was President of the Dalton Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Lappert received honorary doctorates in Munich (1989) and Murcia.

Lappert owned the house where John Dalton was born in the Lake District . He was married to Lorna McKenzie since 1980.

Works

  • with Andrey Protchenko, Philip Power, Alexandra Seeber: Metal Amide Chemistry , Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2009

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Michael F. Lappert at academictree.org, accessed on February 25, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Lappert, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lappert, Michael Franz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 2014