Grignard, Victor

Grignard, Victor (1871-1935), French chemist and Nobel laureate, born in Cherbourg and educated at the University of Lyon. He taught organic chemistry at Lyon from 1906 to 1909 and then at the University of Nancy, where he was a full professor from 1910. In his doctoral thesis of 1900 he made known his discovery of organomagnesium compounds, the so-called Grignard reagents, which are of great value in synthesizing complex organic compounds. For this discovery he shared the 1912 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with the French chemist Paul Sabatier.