Professor Jean Kossanyi

Plate1 Jean Kossanyi

Of Hungarian roots Jean Kossanyi did all his studies at the University of Paris where he received his doctorate in 1964. His career up through the ranks of the CRNS, was interrupted by years of army service (1959–1962), and by several out-of-town research and teaching assignments. He was initiated in mass spectroscopy by Carl Djerassi at Stanford (1964–1965) and in photochemistry by George Hammond at Caltech (1969), and he spent additional periods at the Universities of Rouen (1970–1971), São-Paulo (1984 and 1988) and Berkeley (1988). For the last 23 years, his home base, however, has been the Centre du CNRS de Thiais, where he served as a director of the Laboratoire de Photochimie Solaire (1980–85) and the Laboratoire des Matériaux Moléculaires (1992–95), and as the President of the Centre in the years 1983, 1984, 1992 and 1993.

His initial strong organic chemistry background, reflects his organic synthetic training as a graduate student. This was soon complemented with systematic spectroscopic studies. His first photochemical papers appeared in 1970, dealing mostly with structure-dependent reactivities of various types of ketones, and with interesting applications of Norrish type I photoreactions of various substituted cyclopentanones in the key steps of natural product syntheses (including optically active compounds), mainly pheromones. A decade later new topics surfaced, such as energy and charge transfer phenomena and photochromism.

Photoconductivity and action spectra of semiconducting zinc oxide electrodes doped with transition metals, as well as photoluminescence, electroluminescence and triboluminescence of rare-earth metal-doped semiconducting zinc oxide electrodes were other aspects of Jean Kossanyi’s research in which he demonstrated the mechanism of the electroluminescence emission of the inserted rare-earth metal ions with a kinetic approach to the energy transfer between two rare earth metals incorporated into the same semiconducting electrode.

Jean Kossanyi has also devoted much of his time to scientific organisations at both the national and international level. Suffice it to mention his never ending commitment to EPA: he served as a Secretary (1973–1977), and serves as Membership Secretary and Managing Editor of the Newsletter (since 1999). He organized also the first EPA Summer school in Reims with Jean-Pierre Pete in 1974, the 6th IUPAC Symposium on Photochemistry held in Aix-en-Provence in 1976, the 6th International Conference on Solar Energy Conversion and Storage in 1986 and the 15th International Conference of Photochemistry in 1991 both in Paris. He became a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 2000.

This collection of excellent papers, dedicated to Professor Jean Kossanyi in his 70th year from authors researching in photochemical laboratories in many different countries, demonstrates the high regard with which he is held both as an international photochemist and as a person. It is hoped that he and his wife, Paulette, will grace International Photochemical conferences with their delightful company for many years to come.

Frank Wilkinson

Editor-in-Chief, Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences

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