2021 Award Announcement (PDF)

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Announcement of the 2021 QBIC Society Award The Quantum Bio-Inorganic Chemistry Society is delighted to announce the winner of the Society’s award for the year 2021, Dr. Ragnar Björnsson. The award recognizes the outstanding contributions of Dr. Björnsson to the understanding of biological nitrogen reduction, in particular his quantum chemical investigations on the electronic structure and properties of the iron–molybdenum cofactor (FeMoco) of Nitrogenase, its vanadium analogue, as well as on the nature of intermediate forms adopted by the cofactor along the catalytic cycle of biological nitrogen reduction. Dr. Björnsson will present his research in an award lecture at a forthcoming meeting of the QBIC Society. Brief biography Ragnar Björnsson studied Biochemistry (B.Sc.) and Inorganic Chemistry (M.Sc.) at the University of Iceland. He obtained a PhD in Computational Chemistry in 2012 from the University of St Andrews with Prof. Michael Bühl and went on to do postdoctoral research with Prof. Frank Neese and Prof. Serena DeBeer at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. He was a research fellow at the Science Institute, University of Iceland, from 2014-2018 where he established a research group and obtained the qualification of research assistant professor. Since 2018, he is a group CEC - leader of the computational chemistry group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. His research interests involve open-shell transition metal chemistry, environmental effects in quantum chemistry and computational spectroscopy, with biological nitrogen reduction via multiscale modelling being the main topic in the research group. Credit: Thomas Hobirk, MPI Links: https://cec.mpg.de/forschung/anorganische-spektroskopie/dr-ragnar-bjoernsson https://sites.google.com/site/ragnarbjornsson/home QBIC Society e.V., P.O. Box 130155, 64241 Darmstadt, Germany Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Duisburg, VR 5879 www.qbicsoc.org .

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2021 Chemistry Travel Award by SCNAT and SCS
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