Karl Wieghardt

Karl Wieghardt (born 25 July 1942, in Göttingen) is a German inorganic chemist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim. He was active in the preparation and detailed characterization of models for iron and manganese metalloenzymes, metal complexes of noninnocent ligands, and magnetic interactions in polynuclear metal complexes.

Early life and education Wieghardt was born in 1942 in Göttingen, Germany, the son of the physicist Karl Wieghardt and grandson of the mathematician also named Karl Wieghardt. In 1962, Wieghardt graduated from the Johanneum secondary school in Hamburg.

Wieghardt then attended Heidelberg University, where he studied chemistry. His dissertation involved the x-ray structure analysis of multinuclear complexes of cobalt(III). He then conducted postdoctoral studies with Prof. A. Geoffrey Sykes, at the University of Leeds, where he studied the kinetics and reaction mechanisms of electron transfer processes in binuclear cobalt complexes.

Independent career Structure of OTi(NCS)2(Me3tacn), first example of a titanyl complex as described by the Wieghardt group. Wieghardt returned to Germany, and completed his habilitation at the University of Heidelberg in 1975 with a thesis on the structural chemistry and mechanistic investigations on polynuclear cobalt-amine complexes. Wieghardt went on to popularize the utility of 1,4,7-triazacyclononane and its derivatives as ligands for biomimetic transition metal complexes. In 1994, he was appointed Director of the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry. While at the Max Planck Institute, he developed a research program to study complexes of noninnocent ligands. Since 2010, he has been professor emeritus.

Research highlights

Coordination compounds with coordinated tyrosyl radicals as galactose oxidase mimics Double-exchange in a molecular diiron complex High-valent iron(V) and iron(VI) complexes

Awards Gay-Lussac-Humboldt Prize (1995) Wilhelm Klemm Award from the German Chemical Society (2000) John C. Bailar Medal (2000) Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2001) Ruhr Prize for Arts and Sciences (2005) ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry (2006) Elected member of the German National Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina (2006)