Information for Applicants

Thank you for your interest in joining the Clever Lab!

Please find below important information concerning your application.

Please note that we are usually not able to supply any funding for such a stay, so the application for funding from an exchange program of your university (or from DAAD) is required to cover expenses for travel, accommodation and living costs. Also, information about the eligibility to join a study program, the possibilities to collect credits and the participation in any exams has to be settled by the applicant beforehand, i.e. in contact with the international office of TU Dortmund. It is the applicant's responsibility to obtain a valid visa, health and personal liability insurance and bring enough funds to pay for rents, deposits, travel and living expenses for the duration of the stay.

Please contact Prof. Clever via e-mail. It is advisable to inform yourself about the current research topics and get in touch with the group's PhD students or postdocs beforehand.

Please contact Prof. Clever via e-mail  with a clear idea on which topic you would be interested to work, based on the recent publications of the group.

For applicants from outside TU Dortmund: While there may be funding opportunities from time to time (please also look for announced positions!), the acquisition of external funding, e.g. from DAAD, Fonds der Chemischen Industrie (for applicants from within the European Union) or any other scholarship organisation will raise the chances for obtaining an opportunity to join our lab.

Please indicate in detail about your synthetic and analytical laboratory skills, your handling of specific instruments and software, as well as contribution to scientific meetings and publications. Your application (single PDF file not exceeding 10 MB) should contain a CV, titles of previous research projects, transcripts of university records, references and a dedicated motivation letter, in which you explain your interest in our research, illustrate your fascination for supramolecular chemistry and suggest your contribution to our current projects.

Further note that it is the applicant's responsibility to obtain a valid visa, health and personal liability insurance.

Please be aware that Prof. Clever receives many postdoc applications from all over the world on a daily basis and that unpersonalised, generic applications of the form "Dear sir...", devoid of any indication for specific interest in our work, cannot be answered.

Further, the funding situation for postdoctoral researchers in German universities is usually tense and only very few opportunities for postdoctoral fellows payed from university resources or project funds arise from time to time. On the other hand, excellent candidates with a convincing track-record (proven by first-author publications in renowned, peer-reviewed chemistry journals) may have a chance to earn a postdoctoral fellowship from a prestigious source such as the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation or the European Research Council. Please be aware that obtaining these scholarships is very competitive and an excellent research proposal is a key requirement.

Since Prof. Clever cannot support more than a few of such application procedures per year, he will only be able to consider postdoc applications which contain a fully elaborated research proposal (including introduction, key ideas, research plan, figures and references) from which he may have to make a choice of the most compelling and promising ones to pursue further steps (usually commencing with a Skype interview).

Applicants should make themselves familiar with the group's current research directions, future interests (as articulated on the research section of the website and in the outlook of recent papers), available research infrastructure and general developments in the field. Certainly, highly inspired and unique research ideas, still in accord with the group's general topics, comprising a balanced combination of promising and risky goals, intended to be tackled by an interdisciplinary approach, will be most welcome! In case a funding is granted, it is the applicant's responsibility to obtain a valid visa, health and personal liability insurance.

Contact: Prof. Clever