Profile

I live and work in Glasgow, right on the edge of the city (it’s about as long a drive into the Highlands as it is into Glasgow city centre!). We have two sons. Both are grown up, one lives in Cambridge, the other in Berlin! I grew up in Germany myself, spent a couple of years in Canada, and have been living in Scotland for almost fourteen years now. When I don’t work, I love playing my cello (I love all kind of music), chess (have been playing that since I was ten, not only since Queen’s Gambit!), and go kayaking. I have also taken up learning more languages. Apart from speaking German and English, in both of which I am fluent, and French, which I am quite good at, I am currently learning Russian, Spanish, and Scottish Gaelic – all via Duolingo.

I think organic compounds can be split into two categories: Stable ones that you can buy or make and store, and have a look at at your leisure. And unstable ones that decompose within fractions of a second, doing exciting chemistry along the way. I love working on and with those, using both computers to calculate their properties, or lasers to observe them directly. These highly reactive compounds (called “reactive intermediates”) determine which way many chemical reactions go, and are therefore of great interest in many fields of chemistry, from the industrial synthesis of petrol to the discovery of new drugs! One way to make them is to fire a very bright and short (a few billionth of a second!) laser pulse at chemicals, and then to use VERY fast electronics to measure what happens. That’s one of my fields of research. The other  one (and that’s what I mostly do, nowadays) is to use very fast computers to solve incredibly complicated equations (approximations to the Schroedinger-equation, for the science geeks among you) that allow me to calculate the properties of the reactive intermediates, without having to make them.

After breakfast, I check on my computer how my calculations have done over night. If I can, I start new ones, and try to make sense of the results that I have obtained. Then I do some of the boring stuff – filling in spreadsheets, for example. Some of the more interesting stuff, like teaching students, may also follow. Later, I check up on the calculations on my computer again, before calling it a day and relaxing. Currently, most of my work is doing from my office at home (not exciting!). But sometimes, I use my fancy laser lab at the university. Then I spend the entire day digging myself in, calibrating lasers, doing experiments, and trying to figure out what they mean.