Han Zuilhof

Han Zuilhof (born 1965) holds the chair of organic chemistry at Wageningen University. His interests focus on organic reactions that work efficiently under very mild conditions, surface-bound (bio-)organic chemistry and the development of analytical chemistry tools.

Zuilhof obtained an M.Sc. in chemistry and M.A. in philosophy from Leiden University. After a Ph.D. in organic chemistry (Leiden University, 1994) and postdoctoral work at the University of Rochester and Columbia University, he joined the faculty at Wageningen University. He has been a professor of organic chemistry since 2007. He was an adjunct professor of chemical engineering at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2011-2022). He is a Perennial Distinguished Guest Professor of molecular science and medicinal chemistry at the school of pharmaceutical science and technology (SPST) at Tianjin University, China since 2014, and obtained the Top-Talent Distinguished Professorship of Molecular Science at Jiaxing University, China in 2023. In 2024, he won the Top-Talent Award of Zhejiang Province, China, to set up a center for click chemistry in materials science.

He serves/served on the editorial advisory boards of Langmuir, Advanced Materials Interfaces and Applied Surface Science and was a senior editor of Langmuir from 2016 to 2020.^[1] In 2021, he was awarded, amongst others with Barry Sharpless and John Moses, the Robert Robinson Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry for contributions to click chemistry.^[2] He is also the founder (2011) of a spin-off company, Surfix.^[3]

His recent work includes the discovery of tiara[5]arenes,^[4] intrinsically chiral click reactions requiring no chiral auxiliary or catalyst,^[5] and the synthesis and structure elucidation of SOF4-based SuFEx-derived polymers.^[6]