Henri B. Kagan

Henri Boris Kagan is a French chemist, born in Boulogne-Billancourt on 15 December 1930 to a Jewish family who survived the Second World War by hiding in a village in the south of France under assumed names. He graduated from the Sorbonne and from the Ecole nationale superieure de chimie de Paris in 1954, completed his PhD under Jean Jacques at the College de France in 1960 on steroid chemistry and stereochemistry, and was then a research associate with Alain Horeau. In 1968 he established a laboratory at Orsay, where he became a professor at Paris-Sud, and he became emeritus professor at the Universite Paris-Saclay in 1999. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of asymmetric catalysis, notably through the development of C2-symmetric ligands such as DIOP, and his discoveries have had far-reaching impact on the pharmaceutical industry. He shared the 2001 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and in 2026 was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenso Soai.