Marcel Swart

Marcel Swart

Universitat de Girona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Marcel Swart obtained his PhD degree at Univ. Groningen under the guidance of Prof. Herman Berendsen, Prof. Gerard Canters and Prof. Jaap Snijders. After postdoctoral stays in Amsterdam, he was appointed ICREA Júnior researcher and in 2009 ICREA Research Professor at the Univ. Girona. He was elected Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe (2014-19), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2015), and member of Academia Europaea (2019). He is Founding Member and Vice-President of the QBIC Society, and of the RSEQ-GEQC specialized group on computational chemistry. He organized the Girona Seminars on Predictive Catalysis (2016, 2018), edited the first textbook on "Spin states in Biochemistry and Inorganic Chemistry" (Wiley), was Chair of COST Action CM1305 (2014-2018), and is Director of the IQCC institute (2015-23). He participates in evaluation committees (FWO, LaCaixa), is member of editorial board member for 4 scientific journals, and is Editor for Inorg. Chim. Acta.

Research interests

He focuses on the study of electrons in transition-metals during catalysis and in the formation of nanomaterials. He paved the way and designed new density functionals which enabled him to show how electrons flow in transition metal catalysts by jumping from one spin state to another, enabling the corresponding fingerprinting through computational spectroscopy (IR, NMR, UV-Vis, Mössbauer).  His scientific excellence has been recognized through several honors and awards: he was awarded the 5th MGMS Silver Jubilee Prize for promoting young molecular modelers (2012), and was selected to contribute to “The next generation” 40 years anniversary issue of Inorg. Chim. Acta (2007). Recently, he received a special award in honor of his continuous support for advancing chemical sciences in Serbia (2017), as the first and only foreigner who has received it.

Selected publications

- Souilah C, Jannuzzi SAV, Demirbas D, Ivlev S, Swart M, DeBeer S & Casitas A 2022, 'Synthesis of Fe-III and Fe-IV Cyanide Complexes Using Hypervalent Iodine Reagents as Cyano-Transfer One-Electron Oxidants', Angew Chem Int Ed Engl, 61(22):e202201699.

- Wu T, Rajabimoghadam K, Puri A, Hebert DD, Qiu YL, Eichelberger S, Siegler MA, Swart M, Hendrich MP & Garcia-Bosch I 2022, 'A 4H+/4e-Electron-Coupled-Proton Buffer Based on a Mononuclear Cu Complex', J Am Chem Soc, 144(37):16905-16915.

Selected research activities

In 2022 he supervised one Master's thesis (Rosa Mollfulleda), one TFG thesis (Joan Manel Maneu-Garcia) and two Practiques en Empresa (Jonnely Luizaga, Dani Romero); obtained two BSC-RES supercomputer grants; was invited speaker at ICCC44 (Rimini), SCM, and COST Sustainability Workshop; was member of three PhD tribunals and member of FWO Panel for Chemistry.