Future Prospects
The main focus of research in the Faculty of Chemistry in the coming years will be on successfully maintaining and extending the consortium projects it coordinates, CRC 1093, CRC/TRR 247, and SPP 2122, which are already successfully under way or have recently been launched. This also includes strategic and structural measures within the Faculty that have begun in the past few years and will ensure that the Faculty develops sustainably in those to come. In connection with CRC 1093, the Faculty has successfully appointed Jun. Prof. Jens Voskuhl to a W1 professorship in Biosupramolecular Chemistry. A call is shortly also to be made for a junior professorship under CRC/TRR 247 on the subject of inorganic structural analysis of catalysts. In Technical Chemistry, another junior professor is to be set up before the end of the year with a focus on Electrochemistry. It will be funded under the BMBF’s tenure track programme to promote junior scientists, the same programme that is due to set up another junior professorship in our Faculty, in this case in the field of water and environmental research. The successful programme of promoting junior academics and researchers will continue to be a focus within the Faculty of Chemistry in the coming years. In didactics, empirical educational research is set to continue successfully with the early appointment of Prof. Mathias Ropohl to Prof. Elke Sumfleth’s former professorship. Prof. Ropohl’s main research interests are in development and evaluation of formative diagnosis and assessment methods and analysis of media use in mathematics and science teaching. In the Biofilm Centre, the Faculty was able to appoint another young colleague with excellent future prospects in Prof. Alexander Probst, who succeeds Prof. Wolfgang Sand. It is already apparent today that our junior researchers and members are enriching our Faculty with their new research projects, expanding the portfolio of chemistry in Essen, and adding definition to the Faculty’s research profile. Overall, the conditions for continuing our successful work in Essen are already in place, and with numerous collaborative projects successfully under way and our new junior academic staff and researchers, the Faculty of Chemistry is in a good position for the years ahead.