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Vol.
32 No. 1
January-February 2010
New Leadership at IOCD
Alain Krief has been named executive director of the International Organization for Chemicals Science in Development, replacing Robert Maybury, whose more than two decades of leadership enabled the IOCD to become a highly diversified and recognized organization throughout the world. Krief, previously director of the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at the University Notre Dame de la Paix at Namur in Belgium is widely known in scientific and industrial circles. He is a member of numerous scientific committees, an expert for scientific associations, and a member of editorial boards of scientific journals. Krief’s international experience is extensive: Born in Africa, he studied in France, UK, and USA, and was a visiting professor several times at more than 15 universities worldwide.
IOCD was created in 1981 by Pierre Crabbé, a Belgian chemist working at UNESCO in Paris, with the objective of engaging scientists from developing countries in collaborative research with scientists from industrialized countries. After the sudden death of Crabbé in 1987, Maybury was appointed to continue and develop the work of its founder. Under Maybury, several additional working groups were created to round out IOCD’s attention to the needs and limited resources of developing countries in the areas of environmental and analytical chemistry, medicinal chemistry, plant chemistry, biotic exploration, and natural products chemistry. For this, IOCD received generous funding from public and private donors. A great effort was made to transfer knowledge, through the project Books for Development and through the provision of grants to early-career scientists to enable them to participate in workshops and international scientific congresses. In recognition of his work, IOCD has named him honorary director.
IOCD’s mission is to support collaboration in the chemical sciences to benefit the health, agricultural, and economic sectors of developing countries. The IOCD is an Associated Organization of IUPAC and has conducted several successful joint projects (e.g., on Standardization of Analytical Approaches and Analytical Capacity-Building in Africa (see Nov-Dec 2006 CI, <www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2006/2806/ud2.html>. www.iocd.org
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