Frans De Schryver: Forty Years of Photochemistry and Photophysics

Abstract

Frans De Schryver (born 1939), to whom this special issue of ChemPhysChem is dedicated on the occasion of his 65th birthday, started his career in 1961 as a polymer chemist with a master thesis entitled “Reaction of Phenyl Isocyanate with Aryl Amines” in the laboratory of J. C. Jungers at the K.U.Leuven. He then moved to the group of the famous polymer chemist G. Smets, where he received his Ph.D. for a thesis on the “Influence of the Viscosity on the Photopolymerization of Styrene” in 1964. In this thesis we already find the major foci of his scientific achievements: polymers and photochemistry. In 1964 he joined the group of C. S. Marvel at the University of Arizona in Tucson as a Fullbright Fellow engaged in polymer synthesis. After returning to the K.U.Leuven, where he studied new systems leading to photopolymerization and photocycloisomerization, he continued his postdoctoral research, focused on the emerging domain of photochemistry and photophysics, in the groups of Th. Fcrster (Stuttgart University) and A. Weller (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gcttingen). In this period he married Suzy Bosteels and had two daughters, Dominique (born 1964) and Catherine (born 1971). In 1969 he became assistant professor at the K.U.Leuven, where he built up a research group which evolved into the Laboratory for Photochemistry and Spectroscopy (LPS). In the 1970s, when the curricula at K.U.Leuven were reformed, he started teaching general chemistry and introduced new courses on spectrosco11/2005