Organic Chemistry Frontiers Blog

Organic Chemistry Frontiers is delighted to welcome Professor Arjan W. Kleij (Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia, Spain) as Associate Editor for the journal.

Biography

Arjan W. Kleij received his MSc in 1996 and PhD in 2000 from Utrecht University working on dendrimer- and polymer-supported homogeneous catalysts. In 2000, he moved to industry and worked for more than 3 years at Avantium in its pharmaceutical branch, and later at Hexion as a research scientist. In 2002-2005, he was a postdoc at UAM in Madrid (Spain) and at the University of Amsterdam. In 2006, he moved to the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) and became Group Leader, and was promoted to ICREA Professor in 2011. He is the recipient of a NWO Talent Fellowship and an ICREA junior grant, and recently featured in the author profile section of Angewandte Chemie. Arjan has (co)authored around 180 papers and 4 patent applications with >9600 citations (h-index 55). He is an advisory board member for ChemSusChem and editorial board member for the Journal of CO₂ Utilization. He is chair of the Carbon Dioxide Conversion Catalysis (CDCC) conference and the EuGSC-4.

Research Highlights

His research is centered on the use of effective and new catalytic solutions (both metal- and organocatalysisorientated) towards the preparation of fine chemicals, pharma-relevant compounds and novel materials based on bio-based polymers. Focuses are on exquisite control over chemo-, regio-, diastereo- and enantio-selectivity features creating new synthetic opportunities of fundamental and industrial interest.

Check some of his publications at Royal Society of Chemistry:

Entropic corrections for the evaluation of the catalytic activity in the Al(III) catalysed formation of cyclic carbonates from CO₂ and epoxides

Joan González-Fabra, Fernando Castro-Gómez, W. M. C. Sameera, Gunnar Nyman, Arjan W. Kleij and Carles Bo

Catal. Sci. Technol., 2019,9, 5433-5440

Advances in the use of CO₂ as a renewable feedstock for the synthesis of polymers

Bruno Grignard, Sandro Gennen, Christine Jérôme, Arjan W. Kleij and Christophe Detrembleur

Chem. Soc. Rev., 2019,48, 4466-4514

Self-assembly of bis-salphen compounds: from semiflexible chains to webs of nanorings

Sergey V. Pyrlin, Nicholas D. M. Hine, Arjan W. Kleij and Marta M. D. Ramos

Soft Matter, 2018,14, 1181-1194

Polystyrene-supported bifunctional resorcinarenes as cheap, metal-free and recyclable catalysts for epoxide/CO₂ coupling reactions

Jose, S. Cañellas, M. A. Pericàs and A. W. Kleij

Green Chem., 2017,19, 5488-5493