The Hermann Staudinger Prize is awarded by the

German Chemical Society The German Chemical Society () is a learned society and professional association founded in 1949 to represent the interests of German chemists in local, national and international contexts. GDCh "brings together people working in chemistry and th ...

for groundbreaking work in the field of

macromolecular chemistry A macromolecule is a "molecule of high relative molecular mass, the structure of which essentially comprises the multiple repetition of units derived, actually or conceptually, from molecules of low relative molecular mass." Polymers are physi ...

and

polymer science Polymer science or macromolecular science is a subfield of materials science concerned with polymers, primarily synthetic polymers such as plastics and elastomers. The field of polymer science includes researchers in multiple disciplines inclu ...

. It comes with a gold medal and a sum of money (currently 7500 euros). It is awarded in even-numbered years and is named after the

Nobel Prize in chemistry The Nobel Prize in Chemistry () is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outst ...

winner

Hermann Staudinger Hermann Staudinger (; 23 March 1881 – 8 September 1965) was a German organic chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules, which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also ...

, who is the founder of the field. The prize started in 1970 through donation from

BASF BASF SE (), an initialism of its original name , is a European Multinational corporation, multinational company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters are located in Ludwigshafen, Ge ...

and the first prize was handed out in 1971.

Past recipients

* 1971 Werner Kern and

Günter Victor Schulz Günter Victor Schulz (born October 4, 1905, in Łódź; died February 25, 1999, in Mainz) was a German chemist. He made seminal contributions to macromolecular chemistry. His name lives on in the Flory-Schulz distribution and the Schulz-Zimm d ...

* 1973

Otto Bayer Otto Bayer (4 November 1902 – 1 August 1982) was a German industrial chemist at IG Farben who was head of the research group that in 1937 discovered the polyaddition for the synthesis of polyurethanes out of poly-isocyanate and polyol. Ba ...

* 1976 Hans Fikentscher * 1977 Hermann Schnell * 1979 Georg Manecke * 1981 Hans Batzer * 1985 Helmut Ringsdorf * 1990 Gerhard Wegner * 1994 Burkart Philipp * 1997 Hansjörg Sinn * 2000 Walter Hugo Stockmayer * 2003

Walter Kaminsky Walter Kaminsky (7 May 1941 – 23 November 2024) was a German chemist who specialised in olefin polymerization and plastic recycling. He discovered the high activity of Group 4 metallocene/ methylaluminoxane (MAO) mixtures (later named the Kami ...

* 2006 Wolfgang Peter Meier * 2009 Rolf Mülhaupt * 2012 Axel Müller * 2014 Martin Möller * 2016 Klaus Müllen * 2018 Brigitte Voit * 2020 Markus Antonietti * 2022

Bert Meijer Egbert (Bert) Willem Meijer (born 1955 in Groningen (city), Groningen) is a Dutch organic chemist, known for his work in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, materials chemistry and polymer chemistry. Meijer, who is distinguished professor of M ...

* 2024 Kurt Kremer

References

{{reflist Awards of the Society of German Chemists Chemistry awards