Irina Beletskaya

Irina Petrovna Beletskaya (born 1933) is a Soviet and Russian professor of chemistry at Moscow State University who specializes in organometallic chemistry and its application to problems in organic chemistry. Born in Leningrad, she graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 and took her doctorate there in 1963. She is best known for studies of aromatic reaction mechanisms and of carbanion acidity and reactivity, and she developed some of the first methods for carbon-carbon bond formation with palladium or nickel catalysts, later extended to aqueous media. She became an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1992, served as president of the IUPAC Division of Organic Chemistry from 1991 to 1993 and heads the Laboratory of Organoelement Compounds.