WACKER Silicone Award honors Lutz Greb for his outstanding research

• In 2025, prestigious Silicone Award goes to Lutz Greb, professor at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Inorganic Chemistry
• Internationally pioneering work in complex chemistry and molecular catalysis opens up new properties and applications for silicon
• Combination of synthetic laboratory work and theoretical chemistry impresses Silicone Award jury
• Award ceremony to be held during the 11th European Silicon Days in Salzburg, Austria, in mid-July

Lutz Greb, professor at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, is to be presented with this year’s Silicone Award by chemical company WACKER. Since 1987, the Silicone Award has been presented to outstanding researchers in the field of silicone-based and silicon-containing chemistry every two years. Internationally speaking, Greb’s research in the field of complex chemistry and molecular catalysis is groundbreaking. He combines modern calculation methods with synthesis. Lutz Greb will receive the €10,000 award on July 16, 2025, during the 11th European Silicon Days in Salzburg, Austria.

Greb is conducting research on new properties of compounds with main group elements such as silicon. These elements bind other molecules, also known as ligands, to themselves. This is the basis for creating molecular complexes. The central atoms prefer certain three-dimensional configurations. Silicon normally arranges ligands tetrahedrally around itself. By skillfully selecting and coordinating ligands, Greb and his team have succeeded in forcing these compounds to form other geometries. Although intensive research has been carried out on such silicon (IV) compounds for more than 40 years, Greb is the first to have succeeded in producing them in a quadratic-planar geometry. This has ramifications on physicochemical properties. It gives silicon new potential for applications in catalysis, photochemistry and materials science, while remaining in the oxidation state, which was considered to have been fully examined until now.

Greb has also won the award for his theoretical work on one of the most important basic principles of chemistry: Lewis acids and bases. They describe how strongly molecules can form bonds due to electron gaps or excess electrons. Central atoms such as silicon act as a Lewis acid. Until now, it was possible to estimate the strength of such a Lewis acid qualitatively speaking, if anything. In this respect, Greb and his research group are working on a more precise classification of the interaction. To do so, they are creating as large a database of theoretical values as possible and test these values under realistic conditions in the laboratory. Quantum mechanical calculations and machine learning can therefore be used to determine the Lewis potential of complexes with greater accuracy. What’s more, it enables a new understanding of these compounds and makes predictions possible. On the research group’s website, interested parties can themselves have molecules drawn and calculated (www.grebgroup.de/fia-gnn).

It was this outstanding combination of synthetic and theoretical work that convinced the WACKER Silicone Award jury. “With his research on extremely Lewis-acidic silicon (IV) compounds, Lutz Greb has expanded silicon chemistry in a fascinating way and even opened up a whole new field,” says jury member Matthias Driess, professor at the Technical University of Berlin. “It is the beginning of a widely usable silicon-based chemistry that we will be hearing a lot more about,” adds Driess, himself a former Silicone Award winner.

Lutz Greb has been Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Heidelberg University since 2022. His lectures include the main group elements, bioinorganic chemistry and applied computational chemistry. His research group is growing constantly and shows that his practical and theoretical approach is very popular among students. Greb himself began his studies at the University of Freiburg. After spending periods of research at universities in Paris and Toronto, Greb gained his doctorate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2013. His post-doc then took him to the Institut de Sciences et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires in Strasbourg, France. From 2016 to 2021, Greb was in charge of a junior research group at the University of Heidelberg that was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)’s Emmy Noether Program and the European Research Council (ERC)’s Starting Grant. In 2021, he initially accepted an appointment at the Free University of Berlin before taking up a full (W3) professorship in Heidelberg.