Prof. Ehud Keinan, PresidentThe Schulich Faculty of ChemistryTechnion-Israel Institute of TechnologyHaifa 32000, Israelkeinan@technion.ac.il

פרופ' אהוד קינן, נשיא הפקולטה לכימיה ע"ש שוליך

הטכניון 2 מכון טכנולוגי לישראל חיפה 3200003

Tel/fax: +97224282923913 :טלפון/פקס

לכימיה הישראלית החברה THE ISRAEL CHEMICAL SOCIETY

http://www.chemistry.org.il

הועד המנהל Executive Board

אינג' מלאכי אלפרEng. Malachi Alper

J

ד"ר גיל גובסDr. Gil Goobes

J

פרופ' אבי דומבProf. Avi Domb

J

אינג' דני חןEng. Dani Chen

J

ד"ר דורית טייטלבאוםDr. Dorit Taitelbaum

J

ד"ר אורן טלDr. Oren Tal

J

פרופ' גבריאל למקוףProf. Gabriel Lemcoff

J

פרופ' חיים כהן Prof. Haim Cohen

J

ד"ר מיכל סורני6הרריDr. Michal Soreni-Harari

J

פרופ' אסף פרידלרProf. Assaf Friedler

J

פרופ' דורון שבתProf. Doron Shabat

גזברTreasurer

J

צ'רלס דיזנדרוקCharles Diesendruck

ועדת ביקורתInspection Committee

J

פרופ' אמנון אלבקProf. Amnon Albeck

J

פרופ' טימור באזובProf. Timor Baasov

Project Manager: Liraz Maanit, Faculty of Chemistry, Technion מנהלת פרוייקטים : לירז מענית, הפקולטה לכימיה , הטכניון, E-mail: israelchemistry@gmail.com :Phone, דוא"ל: טל': 972352367135498

December 9, 2018

Dear ICS members,

It is my great pleasure to announce that the 2017 ICS Prize of Excellence will be awarded to Prof. Dan Meyerstein of Ben-­Gurion University of the Negev and Ariel University for his pioneering contributions to inorganic chemistry and their consequences to metals in biological systems;; and Prof. Gershom (Jan M. L.) Martin of the Weizmann Institute of Science for developing novel computational methodologies that lead to new insights into the structures and activities of molecules and materials.

Prof. Gershom (Jan M. L.) Martin

gershom@weizmann.ac.il Prof. Dan Meyerstein

danm@ariel.ac.il

Dan Meyerstein was Born in 1938 in Jerusalem, received his M.Sc. (with Avner Treinin, 1961) and Ph.D. (with Michael Anbar, 1965) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After working for 2 years at the Argonne National Laboratory, he joined Ben-­Gurion University (1968) with a joint appointment at the Nuclear Research Centre Negev (NRCN), becoming Full Professor in 1978. He served on numerous national and international bodies, including Director of the Chemistry Department at NRCN (1973-­77), President of the ICS (1988-­91), Deputy Rector at BGU (1990-­4), Secretary of the Division Inorganic Chemistry of IUPAC (2000-­2002) and President of Ariel University (1995-­2012). He received the Meitner-­Humboldt Research Prize (1997), Kolthoff prize (1998) and Membership of Academia Europaea (2011). He supervised over 100 graduate students and published about 350 papers, 20 chapters and 3 patents. He is best known for applying radiation chemical techniques and many other methods to solve problems in inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry, redox phenomena and kinetics of free radicals. His studies on catalytic processes that involve radicals in biological systems are relevant to the understanding of catalytic, environmental and biological processes. His discoveries include the formation of transient metal-­carbon s bonds in aqueous solutions, transition metal complexes with uncommon oxidation states in aqueous solutions, powerful single electron redox reagents, novel electrocatalytic processes, stabilization of thermodynamically low-­valent complexes by tertiary amines, the role of carbonate in catalytic oxidation processes, water oxidation, oxidative stress, advanced oxidation technologies, and more.

Gershom Martin was born in Belgium (1964), received his B.Sc./M.Sc. degree summa cum laude (1987) and Ph.D. in Chemistry summa cum laude et laudatur (1991), all from the University of Antwerp. After a postdoc work with Timothy J. Lee and Peter R. Taylor (NASA and UCSD, 1992-­1993) he joined the University of Antwerp and reached Habilitation (1994). In 1996 joined the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute and since 2005 he is Full Professor, holding the Baroness Thatcher Chair. He received the ICS Prize for Outstanding Young Scientist (2000), the Dirac Medal of WATOC (2004), Wolgin Prize (2008) and Foreign Membership of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium (2012). He published over 275 papers with over 20,000 citations and h-­index of 78. He has proven the great benefits from merging accurate wave-­function ab initio methods with density functional theory. Methods developed by him have been implemented in popular electronic structure codes such as GAUSSIAN, Q-­CHEM, and ORCA. He has contributed significantly to our understanding of basis set convergence for molecular properties. He was the first to show that scalar relativistic effects are thermochemically significant even for first-­row compounds, as is inner-­shell correlation. His W4 (Weizmann-­4) computational thermochemistry protocol offers 3σ accuracy of ±1 kJ/mol without any recourse to experimental data, and several reference databases built using it are used as calibration and validation benchmarks by leading developers of more approximate methods, as are Martin’s recent benchmark studies on noncovalent interactions by means of explicitly correlated coupled cluster theory.

The award ceremony will take place during the gala dinner of the 83rd ICS Annual Meeting in February 13, 2018. Congratulations to Dan and Gershom for their achievements!