On September 27, a guest professor of School of Frontier Soft Matter Science, South China University of Technology, gave an academic report titled “New Catalysts, New Reactions and New Functional Materials” for teachers and students of our school.

Prof. Hou mainly introduced the recent advances in rare-earth catalyzed olefin (co)polymerizations. By using a heteroatom-assisted strategy, their rare-earth catalysts not only showed excellent controllability regarding on the composition of copolymers, but also exhibit remarkable sequence control, regio- and stereo-selectivity. More interestingly, they could obtain the rare self-healing polyolefin materials through the precise control of microstructure of polyolefins. Prof. Hou also shared their recent advances on the rare-earth catalyzed C-H activation and transformation and other novel organic reactions as well as the dinitrogen activation and transformation by titanium hydride clusters.    

Prof. Zhaomin Hou was born in 1961 in Shandong Province, China. He graduated from China University of Petroleum in 1982 and received his Ph.D. from Kyushu University (Fukuoka, Japan) in 1989. After postdoctoral studies at RIKEN (Saitama, Japan) and the University of Windsor (Canada), he joined RIKEN as a Research Scientist in 1993, where he is now the Director of Organometallic Chemistry Laboratory at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research and the Group Director of Advanced Catalysis Research Group and a Deputy Center Director of the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science. He has been serving as an Executive Editor for Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) since 2021. He received the JSPS Prize (2007), the Mitsui Chemicals Catalysis Science Award (2007), the Chemical Society of Japan Award for Creative Work (2007), the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (2008), the Rare-Earth Society of Japan Award (2009), the Award of the Society of Polymer Science, Japan (2012), the Chinese Chemical Society Yaozeng Huang Award in Organometallic Chemistry (2014), the Nagoya Silver Medal (2016), the Chemical Society of Japan Award (2019), and the Japan Academy Prize (2022).