Hanna Hinrika Cramer Research Group

Research

A more sustainable chemical industry must move away from fossil-based carbon sources and instead utilize renewable feedstocks, such as CO₂ or biomass-derived small molecules. To convert them into useful products like fuels or polymers, new reactivity pathways are often required.

Our group aims to discover these by developing organometallic catalysts that have earth-abundant and inexpensive first-row transition metals. Combining experiments, quantum theory, and spectroscopy, we reveal the reaction mechanism and discover how the catalyst design affects the reaction rate and selectivity. This enables us to rationally design and improve our systems.

Our current projects focus on carbon-carbon bond formation on chromium complexes. Chromium catalysts are typically formed from complicated mixtures that hamper insight into the nature of the active species. Our approach is to develop well-defined precatalysts that are activated by mild, external triggers, such as visible light, and promote new types of catalytic reactions.

In our group, you will gain research experience in synthetic organometallic chemistry (glovebox and schlenkline), characterization methods (NMR, IR, UV-vis spectroscopy; single-crystal X-ray diffraction), mechanistic studies (isolation of reactive intermediates, kinetic studies, resting state identification) and quantum chemical calculations (transition state energies, electronic structure).

As we are a new research group, you will benefit from close supervision and have the chance to significantly shape our research direction! We are part of the excellence cluster RESOLV and a link between RUB and the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr. This gives us access to state-of-the-art infrastructure and close collaborations with partners in electronic structure theory and solvation science. You will therefore have the unique chance to learn highly diverse techniques, depending on your research focus and interest.

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