Digital Publication of Professor Louis Fensterbank’s Opening Lecture

Louis Fensterbank

Molecular Chemistry: New Challenges and Sustainable Innovation

Molecular synthesis is the science of transforming starting molecules to create new, more complex ones. Physically, it involves forming new bonds between atoms through a molecular activation process that can be thermal, photochemical, mechanical, or catalytic.

After more than a century of industrial development and constant innovation, the need for an energy transition and resource sustainability is reorienting research in the field of molecular synthesis—particularly activation processes—to produce molecules with optimized properties for a growing global population.

This book is based on the opening lecture delivered at the Collège de France on Thursday, March 7, 2024, by Louis Fensterbank, full professor holding the Chair of Activations in Molecular Chemistry.

Fensterbank, L., Molecular Chemistry: New Challenges and Sustainable Innovation, Paris, Collège de France, “Opening Lectures ” series, n^o. 330, 2025.

Louis Fensterbank taught at Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University before becoming a research fellow at the CNRS and then a professor at Sorbonne University. He also served as director of the master’s program in chemistry at Paris-Centre and of the Paris Institute of Molecular Chemistry. The recipient of several awards, including the CNRS Silver Medal in 2017, he has been a professor at the Collège de France since October 2023, holding the chair in Activations in Molecular Chemistry.