I am interested in fundamental, down-to-the-atom understanding of surface processes and properties. With scanning probe microscopy, synchrotron radiation studies as well as other surface science analysis techniques, we explore experimentally molecular and supramolecular chemical reactions occurring on surfaces under ultra-high vacuum. We target mechanistic elucidation of on-surface reactions, discovery and development of atomically precise functional materials and establishing principles of form-function relationships in the context of surface nanostructures. Academic and industrial researchers working in the fields of (i) bottom-up nanofabrication, (ii) quantum technologies and (iii) surface processes (including energy harvesting and catalytic processes) are the most immediate beneficiaries of the insights we unravel.
On-going projects focus on modular assembly with functional building blocks such as carbenes, hydroxamic acids, catecholates, and porphyrins. In particular, we investigate the bottom-up assembly of functional metal-organic networks from the single molecule ligation to the 3D network, organic chemistry on solid surfaces, molecular dynamics confined in 2D nanopores, and supramolecular self-assembly on surfaces.