Matthias Driess was born in 1961 in Eisenach, Thuringia. He received his Diplom in chemistry in 1985 and completed his PhD in 1988 at Heidelberg University. While at Heidelberg, he also studied philosophy and wrote his final thesis on "Über den logischen Empirismus von Rudolf Carnap und die Einheit der Wissenschaften" (On the logical empiricism of Rudolf Carnap and the unity of the sciences). After working as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Robert West in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A., for a year, he returned to Heidelberg in 1989, completing his Habilitation in inorganic chemistry there in 1993 with a thesis about silicon and phosphorus in unusual coordination. After three more intellectually stimulating years in Heidelberg, he was appointed professor for inorganic chemistry at Ruhr University Bochum in 1996. In 2004, Matthias Driess moved to Technische Universität Berlin, where he heads the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry / Metalorganic Chemistry and Inorganic Materials at the Institute of Chemistry.  He was spokesperson for the UniCat Cluster of Excellence from 2007 to2018. Since 2019, he has been co-spokesperson of the successor Cluster of Excellence Unifying systems in Catalysis, UniSysCat. Professor Driess was made a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2012 and has been an Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities BBAW since 2014. He has been a member of the European Academy of Sciences since 2020. You can find his author profile for the journal Angewandte Chemie here. 
 

Scientific focus

• Synthesis of novel molecular functions based on compounds with heavier main group elements (e.g. silicon and phosphorus chemistry)
• Organometallic chemistry yielding molecular models for heterogeneous catalysis (e.g. metal oxides), electron-transfer-complexes and the synthesis of molecular single source precursors for nanostructured inorganic materials

Awards and honors

• Lecturer scholarship of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie (1996)
• Chemistry Award of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1997)
• Otto Klung Award for Chemistry (2000)
• Alfred Stock Memorial Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (2010)
• Wacker Silicone Award (2011)
• Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2012)
• Member of the European Academy of Sciences (2020)