BIO
Helmut Schwarz (Nickenich, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, 1943) graduated in chemistry in 1971 after working in industry. He received his PhD degree a year later from the Technical University of Berlin (Germany), which would become his academic home and where he was appointed Professor of Chemistry in 1978. A member of the German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina, serving as its president from 2010 to 2015, the Academia Europaea, and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, among others, Schwarz was also a co-founder of the Berlin-Brandeburg Academy of Sciences, where he was vice-president from 1998 to 2003. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including the Israel Institute of Technology, the University of Innsbruck and ETH Zurich. As well as authoring over 1,000 papers, he has participated in over 1,000 conferences and served on the editorial boards of various journals. From 2001 to 2007 he was vice-president of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
CONTRIBUTION
The combination of advanced experiment with advanced computational tools has allowed Helmut Schwarz to elucidate the functioning of chemical reactions atom by atom, with an unprecedented level of detail. He has run experiments in the gas phase, isolating the atoms one at a time and controlling the reaction environment in such a way that each result could be traced to a single atom rather than the collective effort of thousands. The means to isolate atoms to observe their individual behavior was provided by the mass spectrometer, a tool invented over 100 years ago but never before used for this purpose.
Despite his basic science approach, Schwarz’s discoveries have ended up transforming major industrial processes. A case in point is the German factory Degussa, a precious metal refinery that produces a hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen compound used in a large number of industrial applications. The factory developed a way to produce the compound, coupling methane with ammonia by means of a catalyst. But the coal by-product fouled the catalyst and eventually deactivated it. Schwarz was able to uncover key details of how the reaction worked and propose a modification to the catalyst to prevent soot from forming.
