Professor Jun Okuda, born in Osaka/Japan in 1957, received his Dr. rer. nat. degree at the RWTH Aachen University in 1984 with G. E. Herberich and was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT with R. R. Schrock. After his habilitation at the Technical UniversityMunich under W. A: Herrmann in 1991 he held academic positions at the State University of New York at Albany (as Assistant Professor), the University of Marburg (Professor of Organometallic Chemistry), and of University of Mainz (Full Professor of Inorganic Chemistry), before assuming the Chair of Organometallic Chemistry at the RWTH Aachen University in 2003.

He received the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Award 1991 by the German Minister of Science and Education and was Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Iberdrola Visiting Professor in Spain, both in 1996, visiting scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2001, at the National University of Taipei in 2002 and distinguished guest professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Applied Chemistry, Changchun, China in 2010. He has chaired the “XVth Workshop on Rare Earth Elements” in Mainz in 2002 and was Co-Chairman with W. A. Herrmann for the "14th International Symposium on Homogeneous Catalysis" in Munich in 2004 as well as a number of national meetings. Since 2003 he is board member of the Wöhler Division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) and chairman since 2007.

From 1996 to 2003 he served as selection committee member of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation and from 2003 to 2008 he was an elected member of the committee “Molecular Chemistry” of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

His research interests include ligand design for reactive organometallics, mechanistic study of homogeneous catalysts, and polymerization catalysis. He has published more than 200 papers and holds 9 patents.

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