A new co-Editor-in-Chief for NJC

The Institute of Chemistry—CNRS and RSC Publishing are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Mir Wais Hosseini as co-Editor-in-Chief of NJC, succeeding Pascal Le Floch, who sadly passed away on March 17, 2010. Wais Hosseini is full professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg (UDS) and director of the Organic Coordination Chemistry Laboratory, as well as director of the Molecular Tectonics of Solids mixed research unit between the CNRS and UDS. He has been a member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 1992, first as a junior member, then, in 2004, filling the Chair of Molecular Tectonics.

Wais Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1955. He moved to France when he was 17 to pursue his university studies in chemistry at UDS. After completing his undergraduate degree, he began his research career in the group of Jean-Marie Lehn, obtaining a permanent CNRS researcher position in 1981 and defending his PhD thesis in 1983. He continued his training as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor Ken Raymond at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his early research career at Strasbourg, Wais Hosseini worked on anion recognition (at a time when the vast majority of supramolecular chemists were looking at cation recognition). At the same time, he also entered the newly emerging area of supramolecular catalysis by developing a series of artificial enzymes. In Berkeley, he studied abiotic analogues of iron-transporting proteins. The merit of his early work was recognised by two awards: a PhD prize and a Young Researcher Prize.

Having returned to France in 1986, Wais Hosseini was named a full professor at UDS in 1990. At this point, he moved on from his previous research themes and entered a new area of research dealing with solid-state chemistry and crystal engineering. Though his background was in organic and supramolecular chemistry, oriented towards biology, he jumped into the young field of molecular tectonics, which bridges the gaps between supramolecular chemistry, solid-state chemistry, materials science and self-assembly. Based on hydrogen bonding, he and his co-workers obtained a variety of molecular networks and finally, based on coordination bonding, hybrid networks combining metal centres and organic tectons. His group's most relevant contributions are the formation of inclusion networks, the design and formation of directional organic or coordination networks, the formation of polar crystals based on the use of chirality, the design and formation of optically pure helical architectures, and finally the construction of composite crystals or crystals of crystals by 3-D epitaxial growth.

The multidisciplinary interest of Wais Hosseini's work is attested to by his receiving of prizes from both the coordination chemistry and organic chemistry divisions of the French Chemical Society in 1991 and 2005, respectively. More recently, he was honoured with the Gheorghe Spacu Medal of the Romanian Chemical Society. Among his various other distinctions, he has been a member of the European Academy of Sciences since 2004.

Due to his contributions, Wais Hosseini was early on associated as a co-founder, editor or board member with several journals in the fields of crystal engineering and supramolecular chemistry, and, until the end of 2008, served as a Scientific Editor for Chemical Communications.

During his distinguished career Wais Hosseini has published over 240 papers, delivered over 325 lectures and been an invited professor at a number of universities, particularly in Japan. He has supervised the research of 30 PhD students, and approximately 80 undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In addition to his directorial duties, he has served on numerous committees for both French and European institutions, and has organised a number of symposia.

With a number of publications in NJC over the past two decades, and after having served as the Guest Editor for two NJC thematic issues (Molecular Networks in 1998 and Trends in Supramolecular Chemistry in 2006), Wais knows the journal very well. His reaction to his nomination was:

“It is an honour and a pleasure to join the New Journal of Chemistry, a joint venture between the French CNRS and the British Royal Society of Chemistry, as the French co-Editor-in-Chief. I am looking forward to collaborating with co-Editor-in-Chief Professor Jerry Atwood, Sarah Ruthven (RSC, Cambridge), Denise Parent and Marie Cote (CNRS, Montpellier), associate editors Peter Junk, Michael Scott and consulting editor Odile Eisenstein. I shall do my best to serve the journal, to widen its readership and to increase its impact factor by attracting high quality contributions.”

NJC is honoured that Wais Hosseini has accepted the co-chair of the Editorial Board along with Jerry Atwood. We welcome him to the Board and look forward to a fruitful collaboration.

Denise Parent

(Editor, CNRS)

Sarah Ruthven

(Editor, RSC)

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