Chemistry plays a vital role in society and industry, contributing to advances in areas such as energy, sustainability, the environment, and health. The Department supports these developments through research focused on new and improved molecules, materials, and processes, while also educating the next generation of chemists.
The Department offers degree programmes in Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, and Nanoscience. In addition, it contributes to teaching in Biochemistry, Biology, Molecular Biomedicine, Environmental Chemistry and Health, and Biotechnology.
Inorganic Chemistry – Metal complexes, single-molecule magnetism, metal-templated synthesis, and catalysis.
Organic Chemistry– Design and synthesis of organic molecules and studies of their properties and reactivity.
Nano Chemistry – Nanoparticle catalysis, sustainable energy, molecular self-assembly, and advanced imaging techniques.
Chemical Biology – Research at the interface of chemistry, biology, and biophysics, with a focus on nanoscale phenomena and biomedicine.
Biological Chemistry – Molecular understanding of biological systems, protein structure, and computational modelling.
Physical Chemistry – Experimental and theoretical research in gas-phase and surface chemistry, with a focus on climate, atmospheric chemistry, and protein folding.
With fundamental and outstanding research in chemistry being the core of all activities, we want to contribute to accelerating a “green transition” of society, solving environmental issues, finding tomorrow’s cures of diseases, developing materials of the future, and providing new approaches for realizing a quantum technology revolution.
In our research strategy, we have identified four specific themes that broadly span research within the six research sections of the department: Sustainability, Health & Disease, Quantum Technologies, and Materials of the Future.
Research progresses within these themes will be fueled by an ambition to maintain a well-functioning state-of-the-art infrastructure and by a focus on fundamental science and method developments within all the classical disciplines of chemistry.
This theme encompasses research in environmental and atmospheric chemistry, air pollution sensing, biomass transformations and valorization, catalysis, power-to-X, CO2 fixation and conversion, water desalination, photovoltaics, energy storage and energy research in general.
This theme spans broadly medicinal chemistry, drug development (including efficient screening methods), molecular biology, cell biology and studies of cellular responses, biochemistry and biophysics for applications in drug discovery, drug delivery and diagnostics, and health risk mitigations.
The ambition is to become a significant player in the second quantum revolution, and the theme includes development of molecular spin-based qubits, development of quantum chemical or computational software, and the search for computational chemical problems for which “quantum advantage” could be achieved on future quantum computers.
We aim to “make materials by design”, that is, materials tailored to exhibit specific properties, for example for use in electrocatalysis, as magnetic or conducting materials, as materials for bioimaging, or as optical sensors. A common denominator for many theoretical and experimental projects is a focus on “interactions between light and matter.”
