Stable Carbenes

Didier Bourissou was born in Nice in 1972. He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris from 1992 to 1994 and then received his Ph.D. degree from the Université de Toulouse in 1998. He was a research associate with F. Mathey at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau and is currently Chargé de Recherche at the Laboratoire d’Hétérochimie Fondamentale et Appliquée at the Université Paul Sabatier. He is presently working on new types of carbenes and other electron-deficient species.

Olivier Guerret was born in 1971 in Montpellier. He entered the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau) in 1991 and then joined Guy Bertrand's team in 1994 working on his Ph.D. degree, which he received in 1997. He is currently working for Elf Atochem in the Centre de Recherche Rhône Alpes and his research is mainly focused on the design of new organic catalysts for living radical polymerization.

François Gabbaï was born in 1968 in Montpellier (France). Before joining the research group of A. H. Cowley at the University of Texas at Austin, he studied chemistry at the Université de Bordeaux (France). In 1992 and 1993, he fulfilled his French National Duties by taking part in a Franco-American cooperation under the supervision of G. Bertrand and A. H. Cowley. He completed his Ph.D. degree in 1994 and then was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to join the research group of H. Schmidbaur at the Technische Universität München (Germany). After two years of this collaboration, he was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Commission and was generously offered to stay as a “Habilitand” in the Bavarian Institute. Since 1998 he has been an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University where he is presently working on diverse aspects of p-block element chemistry.

Guy Bertrand was born in Limoges in 1952. He graduated (ingénieur ENSCM) from the Université de Montpellier and moved to the Université de Toulouse as an Attaché de Recherche CNRS in 1975. From 1988 to 1998 he was Directeur de Recherche at the Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination du CNRS and is now the Director of the Laboratoire d'Hétérochimie Fondamentale et Appliquée at the Université Paul Sabatier. His research spans a wide range of topics at the border between organic and inorganic chemistry. He received the International Council on Main Group Chemistry Award in 1993, the Humboldt Award in 1994, and the médaille d'argent of the CNRS in 1998 and was elected Membre Correspondant of the French Academy of Sciences in 1996.