Sponsored by Rio Tinto
The Rio Tinto Award is presented to a scientist who has made a distinguished contribution to the fields of inorganic chemistry or electrochemistry while working in Canada.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2026 winner of the Rio Tinto Award is:
Georgii Nikonov, MCIC
Brock University
Georgii I. Nikonov, FRSC(UK), received a Diploma with Excellence from Moscow State University in 1992 and his PhD in 1995. After a one-year stint at the University of Nottingham, as a Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow, he joined the faculty of MSU where he rose through the ranks to Senior Researcher. In 2005, Georgii moved to Brock University, where he became the inaugural Distinguished Professor in 2024.
Dr. Nikonov is recognized for his seminal discoveries in the fields of transition metal chemistry, main-group chemistry, and catalysis. His earlier research on non-classical Si-H complexes culminated in the development of new catalytic methods for chemoselective reductions of challenging substrates. Mechanistic studies of these reactions led the Nikonov team to investigate related main-group catalysis and fundamental aspects of bond activation on reduced main-group centres. Nowadays, Georgii enjoys studying main-group compounds in very low oxidation states, such as Al(I), Ge(0), Si(0), Si(I), P(I).
His earlier research was recognised by the European Academy Award in 1999 and Eugene Corey Memorial Fund Fellowship, and later contributions earned him the Dean’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 2022, FMS Distinguished Researcher Award in 2019, and inclusion into the Stanford list of 1% of most impactful scientists from 2019 to present.