From March 16 to 18 our group participated in the Zsigmondy Colloquium 2026 held by the German Colloid Society under the motto: Characterisation tools for particle systems and their functional assemblies. The annual conference aims to encourage vital exchange between young scientists from academia, research institutions, and industry entities. Two of our PhD students (Surya Suresh Puthenpurackal & Lisa Balonier) traveled to the city of Erlangen to eagerly share their research via poster presentations. During their visit they got to learn about advanced characterisation techniques and valuable insights into the functional properties of colloidal systems.

We are proud to share a new article about Spin-Crossover Confinement in Mesoporous Matrices Enables Tunable Porosity for Molecular Sensing, a collaborative work with Lucia Pizarro, who did a DAAD funded research stay with us, and Marcelo Ceolin.

We are very proud to announce that Dr. Laura Czerwenka successfully defended her PhD thesis on the Fluid behavior of aqueous solutions in mesoporous films: Imbibition and drop movement. Incredible work Laura!

We welcome you to have a read with our new article about Automated Plasmon-Selective Laser Writing in Mesoporous Thin Films Through Decoupling of the Initiator Absorption and Plasmon Wavelength.

We invite you to check out our new article on the Varying Monomer Charge in SI-bioATRP Polymer Grafting from Mesoporous Silica, a collaboration with our colleagues from the Bruns group.

The Smarties start the year off in great fashion with a string of social activities. At our working group we continuously highly value a collegial work environment and team spirit! In the past weeks we rose to local fame by winning the renowned pub quiz at Bruchbude, celebrated by enjoying a lovely New Year´s Breakfast during a pleasantly cozy January morning and battled in this years first Smarties Game Night.

Our working group strongly advocates resource-efficient lab practices and wants to contribute to a more sustainable future in science. Therefore, we are incredibly proud to share that we have received a LEAF certificate for our efforts. The Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (in short LEAF) is a tool to assess sustainable laboratory practices which was developed at the University College London and is considered to have become the largest green lab certification program on international scale. Yet still our efforts will not stop here as we will continue to strive for highest standards because we consider sustainable lab practices as an important foundation for modern scientific achievements.

What better opportunity to reflect on the year than at our annual Christmas party? On another cozy evening in December we all came together to look back on a remarkably eventful and fruitful 2025. In total we were able to gladly welcome four new PhD students to the working group. At the same time we had two successfully defended dissertations. Our scientific output resulted in seven publications and one new patent. As icing on the cake the members of the CeraSleeve start-up took a gigantic step and finally launched a company. We delightedly conjured up all the memories of conferences, seminars and group activities partaken and celebrated by cooking up an amazing pallet of homemade food, guessing on how well we know our colleagues from photos, playing all kinds of games and drifting off into the night with a neat set of karaoke. Altogether we are truly proud of our achievements and hope to keep this spirit for another extraordinary year in 2026!

On December 9th, our group eagerly joined the latest graduation ceremony held by the Department of Chemistry at TU Darmstadt. We are very proud to announce that Dominik Richter obtained his doctorate. Further we congratulate Tobias Hoffmann who received a scholarship from the Merck`sche Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wissenschaft e.V. to reward his excellent work and scientific achievements. Good job guys!