Iztok Turel
Award-winning full professor and former head (2009-2017) of the chair for inorganic chemistry at the faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology in Ljubljana. He also studied and gained his doctorate at the same faculty in 1995, and gained additional knowledge abroad. He is involved in coordination chemistry and works in Slovenia.
He has published over 100 scientific works which have been cited as much as 3,000 times. He received the Zois Award 2016 for major scientific achievements in chemistry, and is an expert in the field of bioinorganic chemistry. His group’s work has contributed to our understanding of the ways and importance of the interaction of metal ions and certain biologically important molecules. These interactions affect various cell processes and are also important in the formulation of modern medicines.
He is one of the first in Slovenia to have started systematically to deal with the preparation of ruthenium compounds and the study of their properties. Such compounds are used today in solar cells as paints for the adsorption of solar light, in medicines to fight cancer and as catalysts in synthetic organic chemistry. In a book on ruthenium, which was published in 2018 by the prestigious publisher Wiley-VCH, together with his associate he wrote a chapter on ruthenium complexes with antibacterial and antimalarial effects.
He is a member of various editorial boards for international scientific journals. He serves in the administrative board of the UL Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, he is a member of the UL International Cooperation Committee and Slovenian representative of two departments of the organisation EuCheMS. He performs research in numerous fields, ranging from organo-metallic and inorganic synthesis to crystallography, catalysis and inorganic biochemistry.