Assistent Professor

dr. Bettina Baumgartner

Bettina Baumgartner (1990) obtained her MSc in Chemistry (2016) from Technische Universität Wien (Vienna, Austria) working on green techniques to synthesize high-performance polymers and organic dyes. This led to a patent, which was awarded “Best Patent” by the Austrian patent office and is used by the spin-off company UGP materials. She then obtained her PhD (2019) with Prof. Bernhard Lendl at the same university, specializing in infrared spectroscopy. In her thesis, she demonstrated that mesoporous oxide films greatly enhance performance (sensitivity and selectivity) in gas and liquid phase sensing and revealed the effect of confinement on the structure of adsorbed species. She also elucidated photocatalytic reactions using in situ IR spectroscopy. Both her PhD and Master theses were awarded the “Best Thesis” prize from the Austrian Chemical Society. In 2020, she joined Prof. Masahide Takahashi’s group at Osaka Prefecture University (OPU) as JSPS postdoctoral researcher. At OPU, Bettina introduced polarization-dependent IR spectroscopy to study the orientation of metal-organic framework (MOF) films (“IR crystallography”) as well as the in situ alignment of confined guest molecules in MOF pores. In 2021, she was awarded a FWF Schrödinger postdoctoral fellowship to join the group of Prof. Bert Weckhuysen at Utrecht University to study reaction mechanism of the photoreduction of CO2 in photoactive MOFs using operando and fast spectroscopy. In 2024, Bettina joined HIMS as tenure track assistant professor in the Homogeneous, Supramolecular and Bio-Inspired Catalysis group, contributing to the Research Priority Area of ‘Sustainable Chemistry’. Currently, Bettina is the work package leader in the COST action EU4MOFs and serves as a scientific advisor for the start-up Axithra, Belgium, where findings of her PhD thesis are commercially exploited.