Professor Arlette Solladié-Cavallo
A Tribute
Writing a tribute to Professor Arlette Solladié-Cavallo on the occasion of her 70th birthday fills us with great honor and happiness. Arlette Solladié-Cavallo was born in Nice, France, in 1938. She graduated from Montpellier University (chemistry and physics) in 1961 and in the same year earned a Research Engineering degree from Ecole Nationale Supérieures de Chimie de Montpellier and a position of Attachée de Recherches at CNRS. She defended her PhD thesis in 1967 in the field of physical organic chemistry with Professor P. Vièles (known for his spontaneous resolution of lactyl diamides). After one year postdoc at Stanford in 1968 with Professor J.I. Braumann (‘basicity in the gas phase’), she returned to Montpellier to the position of Chargée de Recherches at CNRS (1969). In 1970 she gave birth to Nathalie (who is following the carreer of her parents as an excellent organic chemist). The family then moved to Strasbourg at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie, which became later ECPM. Arlette Solladie- Cavallo in collaboration with her husband, Professor Guy Solladié (well known for chiral sulfoxide chemistry) built the Département de Chimie Organique Fine and was in charge of the basic course of ‘Molecular topology using spectroscopy (IR and NMR)’. In 1982 she was promoted Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and her group was named ‘Laboratoire de Stéréochimie Organométallique’.
Professor Arlette Solladié-Cavallo’s scientific opus reveals her strong and persistant interest in the stereochemistry of organic and organometallic compounds and the use of spectroscopic methods for structure determination (NMR, IR, CD, VCD, in silico modelization/calculation). She cooperated with world known experts in the field and was able to use state-of-the-art methods and instruments. A considerable part of her fruitful scientific carrier was devoted to utilization of chiral arene-chromium-carbonyl complexes in asymmetric synthesis, mainly for resolution of aldehydes and also to preparation of unnatural aminoacids via chiral imines of glycine. Her work in the field of chiral sulfonium salts and corresponding chiral sulfur ylids
