Holger Braunschweig FRSC is Head and Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg in Würzburg, Germany. He is best known for founding the field of transition metal-boron multiple bonding (transition metal borylenes),^[1][2][3][4] the synthesis of the first stable compounds containing boron-boron^[5] and boron-oxygen^[6] triple bonds, the isolation of the first non-carbon/nitrogen main-group dicarbonyl,^[7] and the first fixation of dinitrogen at an element of the p-block of the periodic table.^[8] By modifying a strategy pioneered by Prof. Gregory Robinson of the University of Georgia, Braunschweig also discovered the first rational and high-yield synthesis of neutral compounds containing boron-boron double bonds (diborenes).^[5][9][10] In 2016 Braunschweig isolated the first compounds of beryllium in the oxidation state of zero.^[11]

Braunschweig obtained his Ph.D. and Habilitation from RWTH Aachen with P. Paetzold and worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Michael F. Lappert, FRS, at the University of Sussex, Brighton. After two years at Imperial College London as Senior Lecturer and Reader he took up a Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg in 2002, and is now also the founding director of the Institute for Sustainable Chemistry & Catalysis with Boron (ICB).

In 2009 Braunschweig was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) – the highest German-based research prize. He was also awarded the 2014 RSC Main Group Award and the 2016 Alfred Stock Memorial Prize of the German Society of Chemists. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a member of the German National Academy of Science (Leopoldina), the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. Archived 2019-11-03 at the Wayback Machine