Meet the group

Rafal Klajn

was born in Poland in 1982. He completed his undergraduate education and an MSc in Chemistry at the University of Warsaw in 2004. In 2009 he obtained a PhD degree in Chemical & Biological Engineering at Northwestern University, where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Bartosz A. Grzybowski. He then joined the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is currently a full professor and the Head of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Molecular Design. He has served on the advisory boards of Chem (2016–), Chemical Society Reviews (2017–), ChemPhotoChem (2017–), Particle & Particle Systems Characterization (2018–), ACS Nano (2020–), ChemSystemsChem (2022–), and ChemPhysChem (2022–). He has delivered over 80 invited talks at international meetings and conferences and more than 110 lectures at research institutions worldwide. He is the founding chair of the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) series on Artificial Molecular Switches & Motors and has been elected chair of the GRCs Self-Assembly & Supramolecular Chemistry (2023) and Systems Chemistry (2024). He has co-chaired several other conferences, including the 3rd ERC Grantees Conference “From Supramolecular towards Systems Chemistry”, the 3rd Telluride Workshop on Molecular Switches, Motors, and Rotors, and the 84th Annual Meeting of the Israel Chemical Society.

Klajn is the recipient of several international honors and awards, including the 2010 IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists, the 2013 Victor K. LaMer Award from the American Chemical Society, a 2013 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, the 2015 Liebig Lectureship from the German Chemical Society, the 2015 Israel Chemical Society Prize for Outstanding Young Scientists, the 2016 Netherlands Scholar Award for Supramolecular Chemistry, the 2017 Distinguished Lectureship Award in Photochemistry from the Chemical Society of Japan, the 2017 Chemical Society Reviews Emerging Investigator Lectureship, a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant, the 2018 Cram Lehn Pedersen Prize in Supramolecular Chemistry, the 2019 Award for Research Cooperation and High Excellence in Science (ARCHES) from the Federal German Ministry for Education and Research, the 2019 New Horizons Solvay Lectureship in Chemistry (International Solvay Institutes), the 2019 Sigma-Aldrich Lectureship in Materials Science, and the 2021 Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in Israel.