as well as Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Commission which allowed him to work with H. Schmidbaur at the Technische Universität München (Germany) as a postdoctoral fellow and later as an “Habilitand”.  Upon completing his habilitation in 1998, he joined Texas A&M University, where he became a full professor in 2006 and a distinguished professor in 2019.  In the meantime, he was appointed to the Davidson Professorship in 2008 and the Arthur E. Martell Chair in Chemistry in 2016. François is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the UK-based Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His career at Texas A&M has been recognized by the Distinguished Achievement Research Award from the Association of Former Students (AFS) in 2019, the Faculty Excellence Award from the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) in 2023, and the Distinguished Achievement Award for Graduate Mentoring from the AFS in 2025 and the Outstanding Career Award from CAS in 2026. His national recognitions include two national American Chemical Society (ACS) awards, namely the 2016 F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry and the 2026 Award in Organometallic Chemistry. Other accolades include the 2022 Southwest Regional ACS Award and the 2022 Boron in the Americas Award and several named lectureships, including the 2009 North American Dalton Lectureship, the 2017 James A. Ibers Summer Lectures at Northwestern University, the 2017 Anton Burg Lecture at the University of Southern California, the 2018 Reilly Lectures at Notre Dame University, the 2022 Sheldon Shore Lecture at The Ohio State University, and the 2024 Distinguished Lectureship at the University of South Carolina. François has also received several invitations for plenary lectures at international meetings including the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Japanese/German Symposium (Osaka, 2017), the 12th International Conference of Heteroatom Chemistry (Vancouver, 2017), the 20th European Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry (Berlin, 2022), the 8th Asian Conference on Coordination Chemistry held (Taipei, 2022), the first International Conference on Main Group Chemistry and Catalysis (Kerala, 2023). Internationally, he delivered the Lappert Lecture at the 2018 RSC Dalton Meeting in Warwick (UK) and the 2026 Zen-ichi Yoshida Lectureship in Kyoto (Japan). He has also visited Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and was awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellowship in 2026. Since 2019, François has been an associate editor for Chemical Science, following a similar role at Organometallics from 2011 to 2019. He was chair of the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry in 2011 and chair of the Inorganic Gordon Conference in 2016.