Matthias Beller, born in 1962, studied chemistry at the University of GAttingen, Germany, where he completed his doctoral thesis in 1989 in the group of Prof. L.-F. Tietze. As recipient of a Liebig scholarship from the Association of the German Chemical Industry, he then spent a postdoctoral fellowship in the group of Prof. K. Barry Sharpless at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. From 1991 to 1995, Beller joined the Hoechst AG, where he most recently directed the "Homogeneous Catalysis" project. At the beginning of 1996 he moved to the Technical University of Munich a...