Research in the mulksgrp
We are a young independent research group at the Institute for Organic Chemistry (iOC) of the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. We embarked on our exciting journey in March 2022. Aachen is an atmospheric old German city in immediate vicinity of the borders to the Netherlands and to Belgium. The RWTH Aachen University is Germany's largest university of technology and ranks 108 worldwide across all subjects in the 2021 QS ranking. It scored place 54 worldwide and 3 in Germany for Chemistry. We are always open for discussion, students, and collaborations. Get in touch!
Renewable feedstocks for chemical synthesis are highly oxidised compared to crude oil. We aim to make these feedstocks more useful without energy-intensive processing through the development of reagents and catalysts based on highly oxidised organic molecules. We develop their uses as reagents and catalysts, for example, towards hydrodefluorination reactions, polymer degradations, and for capturing small molecules. We also develop computational models for cost-efficient and intuitive reactivity predictions in p-block elements.
Featured recent contribution
We utilise the different behaviour of radicals and lone pairs to introduce a new distinguishment between hard and soft reactive sites. This concept helps to intuitively understand and predict ambident reactivity and circumvents many problems of established concepts. Read more in the publication in Chem.