Anne Lesage, director of the NMR division of Infranalytics until 2022 received, on April 17, 2023, the Günther Laukien prize, one of the most prestigious awards in nuclear magnetic resonance. Anne Lesage shares the prize with Lyndon Emsley, with whom she worked for more than 20 years within the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon site of our infrastructure.

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Anne Lesage currently leads a group working on hyperpolarized solid-state NMR at the High Field NMR Center (CRMN) in Lyon, France, a unit affiliated with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon) and at the University Claude Bernard of Lyon (UCBL) (UMR 5082). Anne obtained her engineering degree and, in 1995, her doctorate in biophysics at the École Centrale de Paris. A year earlier, in 1994, she accepted a permanent post at the CNRS in the chemistry department of the ENS de Lyon, where, within the framework of a long collaboration with Professor Lyndon Emsley, she began to work on the development and application of new solid-state NMR methods. Anne Lesage and Lyndon Emsley built the CRMN and installed the first 1 GHz NMR spectrometer in Lyon. From 2013 to 2022, she led the High Field NMR Infrastructure (IR-NMR-THC), first as Deputy Director and then as Director. At the European level, it was one of the founding members of the Alpine conference on solid-state NMR. Currently, she co-coordinates PANACEA, a European infrastructure project composed of a group of 12 international partners, whose objective is to provide access to state-of-the-art instruments and experiments in the field of solid-state NMR.

Anne Lesage's many outstanding scientific contributions include the development of solid-state NMR methods exploiting scalar couplings. One of the first results consisted in demonstrating that INADEQUATE-type experiments using J couplings could be implemented in rigid solids, including in disordered systems where the linewidths exceed the values ​​of the J coupling by several orders of magnitude. She has also worked on understanding the origin of line broadening in solids, developing innovative approaches to increase the resolution of proton spectra. More recently, Anne Lesage participated in the development of dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) in solids and was the first to apply it to the characterization of functionalized surfaces. In particular, she demonstrated that it was possible to obtain large gains in sensitivity in porous and non-porous materials, which made it possible to obtain information that was not previously available in the NMR spectra at the state. solid. These experiments have opened up new avenues for the structural study of a wide range of systems, including metal-organic structures, pharmaceuticals, colloids, polymer thin films, and many other systems. It is also active in the development of new polarizing agents for high-field and fast-rotating DNP at the magic angle, for example hybrid radicals and bis-nitroxides. Some of his recent work includes the implementation of innovative strategies to selectively probe the three-dimensional structure of organometallic catalysts supported in complex and multisite environments, which has led to an understanding of the structure of organometallic catalysts. Much of the award-winning work was carried out by Anne Lesage and Lyndon Emsley when they worked together at ENS de Lyon and it is only natural that they share this prestigious award.