August 2026

New papers with collaborators are out:

1. Temporal dependence emerges from a carbodiimide driven acid–anhydride equilibrium coupled to a photocatalytic decarboxylation reaction with Rens Ham and Joost Reek, where I could convince Rens to do in situ IR spectroscopy and chemometrics!
2. Pore Geometry–Driven Capture of Trace Aromatic Volatile Organic Compounds in Al-Based MOFs where Anastasia from EPFL showed how nicely our ATR-IR data fits with conventional gas uptake measurements and computational methods!

July 2026

Very happy to finally share our new preprint! 🎉
This one was long in the making and took a wonderful team effort – including seven different spectroscopic techniques, spanning all the way from EPR to XAS – to understand what really drives CO₂ photoreduction in porphyrinic Zr-MOFs.
In short: it’s not the Zr cluster doing the redox chemistry. Instead, the porphyrin linkers interact with each other, separate and store charge, and can even keep CO₂ reduction going after the light is switched off. 🌙

10/08/2026

Like Christmas for Marika: We installed our new Raman spectrometer!

July 2026

We attended the International Conference on Coordination Chemistry in Odense, Denmark! Marika and Bettina gave a talk and Morgan presented his work in a poster!

May 2026

Jaap and Norbert started their master thesis projects on MOF layer-by-layer synthesis and ROS generation in MOFs. Good luck!

May 2026

Deborah Steiner from TU Wien visited us for operando liquid phase IR spectroscopic measurements on her heterogenous catalysts. It went so well that she will come again in December 🙂