Our Leadership

Prof. Keinan is Benno Gitter & Ilana Ben-Ami Professor of Chemistry at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He was born and educated in Israel, obtained his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science with Prof. Y. Mazur and postdoc at the University of Wisconsin with Prof. B.M. Trost. His interest fields include biocatalysis with antibodies and synthetic enzymes, organic synthesis, molecular-computing, supra-molecular chemistry, improvised explosives, and drug discovery. He has published nearly 200 research papers, 22 patents, and four books. He was Dean of the Technion Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, was an Adjunct Professor at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California (1991-2014), was the founder and first Head of the Institute of Catalysis Science and Technology in the Technion and founded two startup companies. He served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Sciences, GTIIT, Guangdong, China (2015-2016), and since 2020 he holds a Distinguished Visiting Chair at the Academia Sinica. Ehud initiated and led several national projects in Israel, including the Archimedes and Negev-Nobel projects, promoting gifted high-school pupils, and the Chemistry Olympiad.
Ehud is a public writer and activist on science education, higher education, public policy on energy and chemical industry.

Mary Garson is Professor Emerita of Chemistry at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia. She was educated at Newnham College within the University of Cambridge, UK (BA in natural sciences 1974; PhD with Professor James Staunton FRS 1977, topic: the biosynthesis of fungal polyketides). After postdoctoral fellowships in Rome and Cambridge, she migrated to Australia with a Queen Elizabeth II research fellowship held at James Cook University, Townsville where she began her research into marine natural products and their biosynthesis. Academic positions at the University of Wollongong and then in Queensland followed.

Mary is a Past President of Division III (organic and biomolecular) of IUPAC and has served twice on the Bureau of IUPAC (divisional representative 2014-2015; elected member 2018-2021). She was co-chair of the IUPAC100 Management Committee overseeing the centenary celebrations in 2019, and in the 2022-2023 biennium has served as the inaugural Chair of the Committee for Ethics, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (CEDEI). Her contributions to IUPAC also include as Executive Secretary for the General Assembly/World Chemistry Congress in Brisbane in 2001 and in organisation of various Division III symposia. She is best known as the creator of a global networking breakfast for women chemists held in 2011 to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry, and which since its rebranding as the IUPAC Global Women’s Breakfast (GWB) event in 2019 has resulted in >1500 events in 100 countries. Mary has been Chair of the International Relations Committee of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and Chair of Australian Science Innovations overseeing their science Olympiad programs. She is currently serving on the National Committee for Chemistry of the Australian Academy of Science.

An unusual form of professional recognition is the naming of a new species of marine flatworm as Maritigrella marygarsonae. In 2023, the American Chemical Society Journal of Natural Products published a special issue recognising her outstanding contributions to natural products chemistry. Mary holds a Distinguished Fellowship of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), and in 2014 was named as one of their “175 faces of Chemistry”. In 2019, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to education and as an advocate for women in science.

Mary was a SCUBA diver for many years, but now prefers hiking and Pilates as well as listening to classical music.

Zoltán Mester was born and raised in Hungary. He completed his PhD in splitting his time between his alma mater in Budapest and the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) in Rome, Italy. In 1999 he joined the Chemical Metrology program of the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, Canada. His research encompasses analytical mass spectrometry, sample preparation, metrology in chemistry and trace element speciation. He published over 250 peer-reviewed papers and over the years he gave numerous invited and keynote presentations at various conferences and he lectures regularly at universities and research institutions around world.
He has been serving as an adjunct professor at Queen’s and Ottawa Universities in Canada contributing to the training of the next generation of analytical chemists.
He has been with IUPAC since the Ottawa General Assembly in 2003 and has served in numerous leadership roles including two terms as the President of Analytical Chemistry Division (2018-2019, 2020-2021) and also as an Elected member of the last Bureau of the Union (2022-2023).
For more than a decade he represented Canada at the Consultative Committee for Amount of Substance (CCQM), the “chemistry arm” of the Metre Convention. At CCQM he championed stable isotope ratio metrology and initiated a new work program coordinating international standard development activities in this field.
Stating from 2024 for a period of four years he will be serving as the Secretary General of the Union.

Wolfram Koch was elected as IUPAC Treasurer at the 51st Council Meeting. Prior to his election as Treasurer for 2022-2025, he served on the IUPAC Finance Committee from 2008 to 2015. He was a Titular Member of the Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards (CPCDS) from 2014 to 2021. He also served as a Titular Member on the Interdivisional Committee on Green Chemistry for Sustainable Development (ICGCSD) 2018-2019.
Wolfram studied chemistry at the Technical Universities of Darmstadt and Berlin. He obtained his PhD in computational organic chemistry at TU Berlin in 1986. From 1987 to 1991 he worked for IBM, first as a Postdoc at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA (USA), then as a Senior Scientist at IBM Germany’s Scientific Center in Heidelberg (Germany). In 1992 Wolfram was appointed Professor of Theoretical Organic Chemistry at TU Berlin. In November 1998 he joined the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh, German Chemical Society) in Frankfurt. He has been the GDCh's Executive Director since November 2002. In addition, he was Executive Director and General Secretary of the German NAO to IUPAC from 2002 until the end of 2020.

Javier García-Martínez is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Director of the Molecular Nanotechnology Laboratory of the University of Alicante (UA,) where he leads an international team working on the synthesis and application of nanostructured materials for the production of chemicals and energy.

Javier is the founder Rive Technology, which markets the technology he developed during his Fulbright postdoctoral stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 2012, the catalysts that Rive Technology sells are used in several refineries, significantly increasing fuel production and the energy efficiency of the process. In 2019, W. R. GRACE acquired Rive Technology. In June 2014, Javier was awarded the King Jaime I Award in his category of New Technologies and in 2015 received the Emerging Researcher Award from the American Chemical Society. In the summer of 2017, he was recognized by the American Chemical Society with the Kathryn C. Hach Award as the best US entrepreneur in the chemical sector. Javier is a member of the Council of Emerging Technologies and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, of the Global Young Academy, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Since 2019, Javier has served as the Rafael del Pino Distinguished Professor in Alicante, Spain.