Dalton Transactions Blog

The Outstanding Paper Award is aimed at recognising the great work published in Dalton Transactions from the previous year. The process for selecting the winner involves the shortlisting of papers based on nominations by members of the Editorial Board as well as a variety of metrics including article downloads, Altmetric score and citations. The Editorial Board then votes on this shortlist to select the winner.

Congratulations to this year’s winners:

CAAC-stabilised 9,10-diboraanthracene: an electronically and structurally flexible platform for small-molecule activation and metal complexation Maximilian Dietz, Merle Arrowsmith and Holger Braunschweig* Dalton Trans., 2024, 53, 449-453

 In this outstanding article, the authors explored new reaction patterns of a doubly CAAC-stabilised 9,10-diboraanthracene derivative with small molecules and highlighted the structural and electronic flexibility of this framework through complexation with group 6 carbonyls.

Meet the authors of this outstanding paper

Holger Braunschweig Holger Braunschweig is Chair and Head of Inorganic Chemistry at Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg and the Founding Director of the Institute for Sustainable Chemistry & Catalysis with Boron. His research is focused on the chemistry of reactive main-group and transition metal complexes. Braunschweig’s discoveries have led to the publication of over 750 publications, and he has an h-index of 78. He is a member of the German, Bavarian, North Rhine-Westfalian, and Indian science academies, and has received a number of major international awards, most recently the 2024 ENI Advanced Environmental Solutions Prize and the 2024 ACS M. Frederick Hawthorne Award.

Maximilian Dietz Maximilian Dietz studied at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and obtained his PhD in inorganic chemistry in 2023, where he worked on the synthesis and reactivity of neutral diboraarenes under the supervision of Professor Holger Braunschweig. In 2024 he joined the group of Professor Simon Aldridge (FRS) at the University of Oxford, UK, as a Humboldt Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellow, where he is currently investigating bimetallic aluminium–transition metal systems, as well as the chemistry of low-valent group 14 compounds.

Merle Arrowsmith Merle Arrowsmith obtained her PhD in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Michael S. Hill at the University of Bath, UK, on the topic of group 2 catalysis. She then continued working in the Hill group as a postdoctoral researcher, specialising in beryllium chemistry. In 2014, she started a two-year Humboldt Research Fellowship in the group of Prof. Dr. Holger Braunschweig at the University of Würzburg, Germany. She has been working as a senior research officer in the Braunschweig group ever since, with a current focus on highly reactive borylenes and unsymmetrical diborenes.

Please join us in congratulating this year’s winners on our Bluesky, @DaltonTrans.rsc.org, and LinkedIn, Inorganic #RSCInorg!

Construction of Pd-based coordination cages with three geometrically distinct ligands

Ru-Jin Li, Jean de Montmollin, Farzaneh Fadaei-Tirani, Rosario Scopelliti and Kay Severin*

Dalton Trans., 2023, 52, 6451-6456

Kay Severin is professor of chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. His research group works on synthetic organic and inorganic chemistry, with projects ranging from small molecule activation (the chemistry of laughing gas) to the construction of functional nanostructures.

Ru-Jin Li obtained his PhD in 2019 from TU Dortmund under the supervision of Prof. Guido H. Clever. He then continued his passion in supramolecular chemistry as postdoctoral researcher in  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with Prof. Kay Severin. Since 2023, He joined China BlueChemical Ltd. (“CBC”), a modern large-scale enterprise under China National Offshore Oil Corporation (“CNOOC”). He currently focuses on developing environmentally friendly technologies for the Marine Gas industry, and sustainable technologies for direct air capture (DAC) and CO₂ conversion.

Jean de Montmollin received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Interdisciplinary Sciences with majors in Chemistry and Materials Science from ETH Zürich. During his studies, he conducted research projects in the field of organic and inorganic chemistry under Prof. Antonio Togni (aryl-SF2CF3 compounds), Prof. Bill Morandi (ambiphilic ligands) and Prof. Maksym Kovalenko (metal-organic frameworks). Since 2022 he is pursuing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Kay Severin on palladium-based metal-organic cages of low symmetry.