Sustainable Photochemistry & Photophysics

The interaction of light with matter is central to solving global challenges in energy, environment, and health. This focus group explores how light can be harnessed for sustainable applications in photochemistry, photophysics, and materials science. By designing novel molecules and materials that avoid rare elements and instead utilize Earth-abundant alternatives or by developing new strategies for using existing materials in a more efficient way, the group contributes to the development of next-generation technologies for energy conversion, solar fuels, data storage, photomedicine, and catalysis.

Bringing together synthetic chemists, spectroscopists, theorists, and physicists, the group investigates phenomena such as photoinduced charge and energy transfer, light-driven catalysis, excited-state dynamics, and light emission in organic and hybrid materials. Research topics range from fundamental mechanistic studies to device-relevant applications such as OLEDs, OFETs, solar hydrogen generation, and molecular upconversion. A key focus lies in interdisciplinary collaboration that merges synthetic efforts with advanced spectroscopy, machine learning, and computational modeling to advance photochemical processes that are both efficient and sustainable.