Frank Würthner

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Frank Würthner (born June 27, 1964 in Villingen-Schwenningen ) is a German chemist ( organic chemistry , supramolecular chemistry ) and one of the founders of supramolecular materials science. He is a professor at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg .

Life

Frank Würthner studied chemistry from 1984 at the University of Stuttgart (diploma 1990), where he received his doctorate in 1993 under Franz Effenberger . The dissertation was on donor-acceptor substituted oligothiophenes and their use in molecular electronics. As a post-doctoral student and Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he worked with Julius Rebek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He then went to BASF in Ludwigshafen in 1995/96 to do dye research. There he worked on dyes for non-impact printing , electroluminescence and non-linear optics. In 1997 he went to Ulm University as a Liebig scholarship holder and completed his habilitation under Peter Bäuerle , working on organic materials for photonics and the supramolecular chemistry of dyes. In 2002 he became professor for organic chemistry at the University of Würzburg. There he is director of the Center for Nanosystem Chemistry (CNC), which he founded in 2010. From 2007 to 2009 he was Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy.

In 2013 he was visiting professor at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, 2010/11 visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and 2010 visiting professor in Angers.

plant

He is concerned with the synthesis of supramolecular polymers and nanomaterials based on functional dyes with applications, for example, in photovoltaics (conversion of solar energy into electricity) and the development of nanoreactors in which dyes collect light and then use the energy obtained in this way to split water photocatalytically ( Conversion of solar energy into chemical energy). In doing so he follows models from nature ( artificial photosynthesis ). In this context, he participates in the Bavarian research network Solar Technologies go hybrid and received funding for this through an ERC Advanced Grant, after a first breakthrough was achieved in 2016 (oxidative partial reaction in a macrocycle with ruthenium).

In 2018, in collaboration with the physicists Jacek Stolarczyk and Jochen Feldmann from the University of Munich, he succeeded in simultaneously carrying out the oxidation and reduction step in water splitting with the help of photocatalysis on semiconductor nanocrystals. In semiconductors, photons create electron-hole pairs. An essential point was to spatially separate the oxidation and reduction sites on the cadmium sulfide semiconductors. The reduction of water to hydrogen takes place at the tip of the nanocrystals, where platinum particles take up the electrons, and the oxidation (formation of oxygen molecules) at the sides of the nanocrystals, where the ruthenium catalysts developed by Würthner with special anchor groups are attached and the holes are made the semiconductor.

In 2009 he developed nanocapsules made of perylene bismide dyes, which are stable in aqueous solution when photocrosslinked under the action of light (for a wide range of pH values). The Chinese visiting scholar Xin Zhang filled them with bispyrene dye. They change their shape depending on the pH value. The overall system emits different fluorescent light depending on the pH value, so that it forms a nanoprobe for the pH value.

He is also concerned with photovoltaics, liquid crystals, organic electronics (organic semiconductors and transistors) and functional nanosystems for biomedicine and develops corresponding nanomaterials in these areas. In this context, he examines the self-assembly and self-organization of molecules into larger associations. He assumes dyes such as merocyanines, chlorines and perylenebisimides.

Honors and memberships

In 2019 he received the Adolf von Baeyer medal . He is on the board of the Bavarian Polymer Institute (BPI). In 2017 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and in 2016 he became a member ( matriculation number 7685 ) of the Leopoldina .

In 2018 he received an ERC Advanced Grant. Since 2014 he has been one of the highly cited scientists at Thomson Reuters. In 2002 he received the Arnold Sommerfeld Prize . In 2016 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry . He received the Elsevier Lectureship Award from the Japanese Photochemistry Association, the Elhuyar – Goldschmidt Award from the Royal Spanish Society for Chemistry and the Ta-shue Chou Lectureship Award in Taiwan.

Fonts (selection)

Besides the writings cited in the footnotes:

  • Perylene bisimide dyes as versatile building blocks for functional supramolecular architectures, Chemical Communications, July 21, 2004, pp. 1564-1579
  • with Theo Kaiser, Chantu Saha-Möller: J-aggregates: from serendipitous discovery to supramolecular engineering of functional dye materials, Angewandte Chemie Int. Edition, Volume 50, 2011, pp. 3376-3410, PMID 21442690
  • with Arnona-Esteban, Lenze, Meerholz: Donor - Acceptor Dyes for Organic Photovoltaics, in: K. Leo (Ed.), Organic Photovoltaics, 2017, pp. 193--214.
  • with Stefanie Herbst a. a .: Self-assembly of multi-stranded perylene dye J-aggregates in columnar liquid-crystalline phases, Nature Communications, Volume 9, 2018, 2646–2654, online
  • with Jakub Dostál, Franziska Fennel, Federico Koch, Stefanie Herbst, Tobias Frank: Direct observation of exciton – exciton interactions, Nature Communications, Volume 9, 2018, pp. 2466--2473.

literature

  • Jörg Hacker (Ed.): Leopoldina . Yearbook 2016. Series 3, year 62. German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina eV - National Academy of Sciences, Halle (Saale) 2017, ISBN 978-3-8047-3707-5 , p. 149–150 ( leopoldina.org [PDF; 11.7 MB ; accessed on April 24, 2019]).
  • Michael Kaasch and Joachim Kaasch (eds.): Leopoldina . Newly elected members in 2016. German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina e. V. - National Academy of Sciences, Halle (Saale) 2017 ( leopoldina.org [PDF; 1.6 MB ; accessed on April 24, 2019]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marcus Schulze, Valentin Kunz, Peter Frischmann, Frank Würthner: A supramolecular ruthenium macrocycle with high catalytic activity for water oxidation that mechanistically mimics photosystem II, Nature Chemistry Volume 8, 2016, pp. 576-583
  2. ↑ Kunz, Lindner, Schulze, Rohr, Schmidt, Mitric, Würthner: Cooperative water oxidation catalysis in a series of trinuclear metallosupramolecular ruthenium macrocycles, Energy Environ. Sci., Volume 10, 2017, pp. 2137-2153
  3. ↑ Christian Wolff, Peter Frischmann, Marcus Schulze, Bernhard Bohn, Robin Wein, Panajotis Livadas, Michael Carlson, Frank Jäckel, Jochen Feldmann, Frank Würthner, Jacek Stolarczyk: All-in-one visible-light-driven water splitting by combining nanoparticulate and molecular co-catalysts on CdS nanorods, Nature Energy, Volume 3, 2018, pp. 862-869
  4. ↑ Multitool for solar water splitting , University of Munich, September 6, 2018
  5. ↑ Würthner, Xin Zhang, Stefanie Rehm, Marina M. Safont-Sempere: Vesicular perylene dye nanocapsules as supramolecular fluorescent pH sensor systems, Nature Chemistry, Volume 1, 2009, pp. 623–629
  6. ↑ Nanocapsules for artificial photosynthesis , chemie.de, November 4, 2009
  7. ^ Chemistry Professor Frank Würthner Highly Cited Worldwide , CNC, University of Würzburg, February 2, 2016
  8. ↑ Exciton-Exciton-Interaction-Two-Dimensional (EEI2D) Spectroscopy , New Methods of 2D Spectroscopy , University of Würzburg June 29, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Würthner, Frank
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Villingen-Schwenningen