Paul Hagenmuller

Paul Hagenmuller (August 3, 1921 – January 7, 2017) was a French chemist. Hagenmuller founded the Laboratoire de Chimie du Solide (Solid-State Chemistry Laboratory) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and he served as its Director until 1985. He is considered "one of the founders of solid-state chemistry."

Biography
Hagenmuller was born in 1921 in Alsace, France. After studying in Strasbourg and Clermont-Ferrand, during WW2, Hagenmuller was imprisoned in the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps. During those years, he was involved in sabotaging German missiles. In 1950 he received his PhD from Sorbonne University. Subsequently, he spent two years teaching as a lecturer (maître de conférences) in Vietnam. He returned to France in 1956 and was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Rennes, working on "nonstoichiometry in vanadium and tungsten bronzes, two-dimensional oxyhalogenides, borides, and silicides, magnetic spinels". In 1961 he started working at the University of Bordeaux.

Hagenmuller was noted for instigating cooperation between French researchers and researchers from the Soviet Union and Germany, his years in the concentration camps greatly affected his character. He also collaborated with noted scientists such as John Goodenough, Jacques Friedel and Nevill Francis Mott on insulator-to-metal transitions of vanadium oxides. In the 1970s, he started working with Neil Bartlett on metal fluorides. His most noted research discovery was the synthesis of and, which would later become important superconductor materials. His work on sodium-ion batteries received great interest years after it was published.

In 2018 Hagenmuller remained the 4th most cited author from the Journal of Solid State Chemistry.

Awards and decorations

 * Croix de Guerre 1939–1945
 * Bundesverdienstkreuz (1985)
 * Legion of Honour (1988)
 * Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize (1982)
 * Prix de la Fondation de la Maison de la Chimie (1986)