Richard V. Dronskowski

Richard Dronskowski is distinguished professor of chemistry at RWTH Aachen University (Aachen, Germany) and holds the chair of solid-state and quantum chemistry. He has enjoyed guest professorships at Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) and at the Hoffmann Institute of Advanced Materials (Shenzhen, China). Professor Dronskowski has received various awards, such as the Otto Hahn Medal (1990), the Prize of Angewandte Chemie (1996), the M. N. Saha Memorial Lecture (2014), and the Egon Wiberg Lecture (2017).

Professor Dronskowski has pioneered the quantum chemistry of solids, in particular as regards chemical bonding, ab initio phase prediction of novel steels, the theory of phase-change materials, thermochemistry from first principles, and ab initio ORTEP plots. He has also made fundamental contributions to synthetic solid-state chemistry, i.e., the preparation of metastable solids, nitrides, complex-anion materials such as transition-metal carbodiimides, guanidinates, and also semiconductors and intermetallics. Third, chemical crystallography regarding small, often unstable molecules, and modern neutron diffraction including the future POWTEX diffractometer is part of ongoing research.

Professor Dronskowski’s work is covered in more than 550 original publications. In addition, he is the author of Computational Chemistry of Solid State Materials, Wiley-VCH 2005, and Chemical Bonding from Plane Waves via Atomic Orbitals, Walter de Gruyter 2023. He is also the editor of the Handbook of Solid State Chemistry, Wiley-VCH 2017.

Professor Dronskowski holds a chemistry diploma (1987) and a physics diploma (1989), both from Münster University (Germany), a doctorate (1990) from the Technical University of Stuttgart (Germany), and a habilitation degree (1995) from the Technical University of Dortmund (Germany).