About Me

I am a group leader at the Faculty of Physics at the University-Duisburg-Essen, Germany running a group with focus on “Computational Science of Interfaces”. For five years we are supported by a return fellowship from the state of North-Rhine Westphalia. We are further associated with the RESOLV cluster of excellence and the graduate school on “Confinement-Controlled Chemistry”.

Before, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Martin Head-Gordon at the University of California at Berkeley. In my main project, I developed grand-canonical electronic structure methods for electrocatalysis. Side projects cover a range of topics such as strong correlation, machine learning, magnetic coupling in inorganic complexes and kinetics of gas-phase reactions.

Before I came to Berkeley I did my PhD in theoretical chemistry in the group of Prof. Markus Reiher at ETH Zürich. There, I developed automated methods for the crucial active orbital space selection in multi-configurational calculations. This automated procedure relies on orbital entanglement measures obtained from partially converged density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations. In a second project, I extended our QCMaquis DMRG program for the calculation of vibrational wave functions together with Dr. Alberto Baiardi.

I studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen from 2009 to 2014. From 2013, I worked as a student researcher in the group of the late Prof. Peter Botschwina. In several projects, we calculated rovibrational spectra of small, linear molecules with sub-wavenumber precision.