Christian Merten

With profound sadness, we announce the passing of Sir Fraser Stoddart, Nobel Laureate and cherished member of @NorthwesternU. His groundbreaking contributions transformed the field of #chemistry and inspired countless scientists worldwide. ➡️ bit.ly/stoddart-in-me…

Congratulations to Elliot for passing his PhD defense this morning. 🥳 Thank for the new insights to halogen bonding and for expanding our knowledge on New Zealand! 😀 Wishing you all the best for the future! @ChemieBiochemie @ruhrunibochum

@NiemeyerGroup Congratulation. 😀

We did not tell you yet about this wonderful work by Charles Loh in @angew_chem , to which we could contribute with an AC determination using #VCDspectroscopy? Well, now we did. 😉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/an…

Thank you @LesotPhilippe and your co-organizers for having me. It was a great meeting!

Our delegation in Kyoto 🇯🇵: Debbie and Tim presented their latest results at “Chirality 2025” last week and enjoyed Japanese culture, history and food.

Read our recent perspective article on the Challenges and Opportunities of Increasingly Accurate and Complex VCD Experiments and Computations, which is out now in @JPhysChem Letters. (w/ @JulienBloino @SaschaJaehnigen). 👉 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

At VOA8, we celebrated 50 years of VCD and ROA (1st papers date back to 1973!). During the conf. dinner, we held a historic perspectives session with contributions by @LarryNafie @Rkdukor, Tim Keiderling, Sergio Abbate & Josef Kapitan. 🎂🥳 Thank you for charging these memories!

We enjoyed 40 talks and 33 poster contributions last week at VOA8 (@voaconference) in Bochum. Big congrats to Fredde for winning a poster prize for her study on chiral triplet nitrenes!

We are ready to kick of VOA8 (@voaconference) with the welcome reception at Bermuda Lounge. Zemos als also waiting for us tomorrow morning!

Finally, also many thanks to Tohru Taniguchi for inviting me to @HokkaidoUni in Sapporo. It was a great pleasure to visit you and I really enjoyed the wonderful day and evening with you, @MondeKenji11531, @NobuyaTsuji (@ICReDDconnect) and all others! 😀

Frederike, Malte and Christian joint the Chemistry and Physics at Low Temperature (CPLT2024) meeting in Niseko, Hokkaido, Japan. Great science, but not so great weather during the excursion. 🙈

@hirosh_naka Many many thanks for the hospitality! 😀

Welcomed Prof. Dr. Christian Merten @MertenLab from Ruhr-University Bochum. Many thanks for the stimulating & instructive talk on VCD!

I had a great day at @KyotoU_News Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Many thanks to @hirosh_naka and his great colleagues for hosting me and for providing us with this great food experience!

Great work! Happy we could contribute an absolute configuration to this nice study. 😀 #VCDspectroscopy

How complicated can it be to predict the #VCD of proline at different pH values? Deborah shows in her #firstfirstauthor paper in @PCCP: Very! 🤯 Spoiler: The orientation of single H2O in large Pro-(H2O)n clusters affects the spectrum! Read more: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/art…

We finally succeeded in recording the #VCD spectrum of a chiral high-spin organic triplet nitrene under MI conditions. Read the full story now in @ChemEurJ! 👉…mistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10… @grk2376 @SolvationSci @dfg_public

Lookling forward to it. :)

📢**Abstract deadline getting close! ** Submit your contribution until tomorrow (May 15th) via voa8.mertenlab.de! Do not procrastinate, do not tell yourself "they'll postpone the deadline anyways". 😉

It is with profound sadness that IOCB Prague announces the sudden passing of Prof. Josef Michl, a globally esteemed Czech chemist, on Monday, 13 May, at the age of 85. Prof. Michl led research groups at @IOCBPrague and @CUBoulder. "He was one of the few true geniuses I have had the honor to meet," says Prof. @konvalinka_jan, director of IOCB Prague. "He mastered several world languages, had extensive knowledge of history and culture, and a deep understanding of the natural sciences. The science he did was not only brilliant but also beautiful, playful, and witty. Besides that, and above all, he was a kind and generous man. We will miss him dearly." Dr. Zdeněk Havlas, Vice President of the @CzechAcademy and a long-time friend and colleague of Josef Michl, responded to the news of his passing: "The passing of Prof. Michl is a great loss both professionally and personally. He knew everything there was to know about chemistry and science in general. It was a joy to discuss with him. For the past 20 years, I traveled to Boulder annually for a month, not because of a lack of computing technology, but for discussions about work and life in general. This often took place while enjoying a plum cake, which he loved and which I baked for him at their home." Prof. Josef Michl, Ph.D. (12 March 1939 in Prague – 13 May 2024 in Prague), was a distinguished figure in the field of chemistry with an extremely wide range of professional interests in which he achieved significant results and worldwide renown. He excelled as both a theoretician and an experimentalist, devoted, among other things, to macromolecular chemistry, photochemistry, molecular electronics, research towards the development of efficient solar cells, and the creation of molecular "building blocks" enabling, for example, the creation of nanorotors and nanomotors. Josef Michl studied chemistry at @science_charles and completed his dissertation under the supervision of quantum chemist Rudolf Zahradník at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He earned his doctorate in 1965 and subsequently worked at the Universities of Houston and Austin. After a brief return to Czechoslovakia, he attended a summer school in quantum chemistry in Norway in 1968, from which he did not return following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. He then served as an assistant professor in Denmark before moving to the United States, where he held positions at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and the University of Texas at Austin. In 1991, he joined the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he led a research group until his death. From 2006, he also worked at IOCB Prague, where he received the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant in 2009. In 1986, he was elected to @theNASciences, and in 1988, he became a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and served as its president from 2012 to 2018. In 1995, he became a member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic @ucena_spol. In 1999, he was elected to @americanacad. He authored over 600 scientific papers, several books, and numerous patents. Throughout his illustrious career, Josef Michl received many prestigious awards, including the Alexander von Humboldt Award (1980), the Schrödinger Medal (1993), the Hammond Award (2015), the Neuron Award for Contribution to World Science (2016), the Medal of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic for Merit in the Development of Science (2019), and others. He also received honorary doctorates from @Georgetown University, @UniPardubice, and @MasarykUni. uochb.cz/en/news/610/jo…