Susumu Kitagawa

Susumu Kitagawa (北川 進, Kitagawa Susumu, born July 4, 1951) is a Japanese chemist working in the field of coordination chemistry, with specific focus on the chemistry of organic–inorganic hybrid compounds, as well as chemical and physical properties of porous coordination polymers and metal-organic frameworks in particular.^[1] He is currently Distinguished Professor at Kyoto University, in the Institute for Integrated Cell–Material Sciences, of which he is co-founder and current director.

From 1975 to 1979, Kitagawa pursued and obtained a PhD degree in hydrocarbon chemistry, at Kyoto University, where he had previously done his undergraduate studies. He was appointed in 1979 at Kindai University as Assistant Professor, promoted first to Lecturer in 1983, and in 1988 to Associate Professor.^[2] In 1992, he became Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University and in 1998 Professor of Inorganic Functional Chemistry at the University of Kyoto, in the department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry. In 2007 he co-founded Institute for Integrated Cell–Material Sciences, and was named Deputy Director. Since 2013 he is the Director of the Institute.

In addition to his academic positions in Japan, he was guest professor at Texas A&M University in 1986–1987, and at the City University of New York in 1996.

Awards

In 2008, he received the Humboldt Research Prize, the Chemical Society of Japan Award in 2009, and the 2003 Creative Society of Japan (CSJ) Prize for Creative Work. In 2010, he was one of the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates. In 2011 he received the medal with a purple ribbon and became a member of the Science Council of Japan. He was awarded the 2017 Chemistry for the future Solvay Prize.^[3]

Bibliography

Professor Kitagawa has published more than 600 research articles in international journals, and these papers are cited more than 25,000 times (as of October 2017^[4]). His most cited works include:

• in 1997, a seminal report on a porous coordination polymer (MOF) for small molecule adsorption^[5]
• in 2004, an early review of functional porous coordination polymers^[6]
• in 2005, a study of dynamic properties of porous coordination polymers based on hydrogen bonds^[7]
• in 2009, a review of “soft porous crystals”, which feature large-scale structural transformability upon chemical or physical stimulation^[8]

References