News

On Monday, 28.04.2025, we had the pleasure of welcoming guests from the University of Amsterdam, led by Prof. Joost Reek and Prof. Bas de Bruin, at the Faculty of CCB. Together with the research groups of Prof. Max Hansmann, Dr. Elisabeth Kreidt and Dr. David van Craen, a symposium was held, featuring exciting presentations on diverse topics in the fields of supramolecular chemistry and catalysis, followed by a poster session that fostered lively scientific and social exchange between the groups.

We congratulate Ertugrul Yalcin for successfully defending his PhD on squaramide-based coordination cages. All the best for the future!

 

We congratulate Dr. Irene Regeni for her new position as junior group leader at the Institute of Supramolecular Science and Engineering (ISIS) in Strasbourg. After obtaining her doctoral degree in the Clever group, she pursued a post-doc in the group of Sylvestre Bonnet. Her independent research at ISIS focuses on the design of biocompatible supramolecular architectures.

We are proud to share that former PhD student Dr. Elie Benchimol was awarded the PhD prize of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (donated by Bayer AG) and the PhD prize of DFG Cluster of Excellence RESOLV (donated by Dr. Klaus Engel, former CEO of Evonik) for his work on multi-cage systems and dynamic transformations. Congratulations!

Dr. Aleksandr Mikherdov secured a highly competitive Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship for his postdoctoral research on multifunctional coordination cages. We congratulate him and are looking forward to his exciting research!

As part of his doctoral research, Armin Durmisevic completed a three-month research stay with Prof. Ramon Vilar's group at Imperial College London. During this time, he used fluorescence microscopy to study human cancer cells transfected with chemically modified DNA oligonucleotides capable of forming G-Quadruplex structures. This work provided valuable insights into the in vivo behavior of these artificial systems and their potential implications for future applications. We extend our gratitude to Prof. Vilar’s group for their hospitality and to the RESOLV Cluster of Excellence for their support and funding.

We welcome PhD student Zhiwei Zeng (left) from the Nanjing University of Science & Technology in China who will stay with us for one year. We also welcome master student Rena Yamaguchi (right) from the Ochanomizu University in Japan who came for a short internship abroad. Both will be researching on Pd(II)-based coordination cages. We are looking forward to working with you!

We congratulate Alexandre Walther for defending his PhD on azulene-based coordination cages with great success. All the best for the future!

We welcome Tania, Maciej, Julia, Mateusz, Mateusz and Dorota. Tania is a visiting PhD student from the group of Prof. Ribas, University of Girona, Spain, who will join us for three months to work on fullerene-binding cages. Dorota, Julia, Maciej, Mateusz and Mateusz from the group of Prof. Lewandowski, University of Warsaw, Poland, join us for a week to conduct CPL measurements.

Christoph Drechsler successfully defended his PhD on complex systems based on coordination cages. Congratulations and all the best for the future!

We congratulate Elie Benchimol for defending his PhD on multi-cage systems and dynamic transformations with great success!

We welcome a new group member: Aiswarya Roby joins as a PhD student and will work on multifunctional cages based on Cobalt. We are looking forward to working with you!

Dr. Christina Krabbe takes over the responsibilities of Dr. Gabriele Trötscher-Kaus.

We are happy to welcome a new permenant member in the Clever group: Dr. Christina Krabbe will support the group and the faculty of Inorganic Chemistry. Her responsibilities include teaching, for instance the organization of lab courses, administration, and management of third party funds. We are looking forward to working with you!

We thank Dr. Gabriele Trötscher-Kaus for her work at TU Dortmund in the past 36 years. Happy retirement, Gabi!

We welcome Dr. Aleksandr Mikherdov who is joining the group as a postdoctoral researcher. He will work on functional coordination cages. All the best for your research and we are looking forward to working with you!

At the Girona Seminar 2024 on Supramolecular Chemistry, PhD students Alexandre Walther and Lars Hebenbrock won prizes for their oral and poster presentation, respectively. Congratulations!

PhD student Armin Durmisevic won a presentation award in the G4 webinar series for his talk on chemically modified DNA G-quadruplexes. Congratulations!

We congratulate PhD students Alexandre Walther and Elie Benchimol for winning a poster prize at SupraChem 2024! Alexandre Walther presented his work on azulene-based cages and Elie Benchimol his work on non-statistical self-sorting.

The CleverLab wishes Merry Christmas!

Within the scope of her doctoral research, Laura Neukirch did a three month internship in the group of Prof. Schlau-Cohen at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By applying ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy, she got insight into the excited state dynamics of coordination cages which she synthesized at TU Dortmund. We thank the group for their hospitality and RESOLV Cluster of Excellence for funding.

We welcome our new secretary, Astrid Riedel, who started to work with us on 02.10.2023.
Astrid comes from “outside” the university. She has a degree as a business economist and was working for the last 12 years as a coordinator and secretary in the health care sector.

Astrid, we are looking forward to work with you!

We say farewell to our longtime secretary Birgit Thormann who retired in August 2023 after 49 years working at TU Dortmund (formerly University of Dortmund). Birgit started her professional life at the University of Dortmund where she was trained as a lab technician. Over the years she took over more tasks in the office and in 2015 she became chair secretary of Prof. Guido Clever.
Birgit, we wish you all the best for your well deserved retirement and want to thank you for your hard work and reliable support during the last years!

Today, the 17th of May, it’s the CleverLab’s 13th birthday! The photos show some impressions about the beginning of the journey at the University of Göttingen: the first group photo, the first cage cake, the first synthetic works, and the set-up of the labs.

We are welcoming Yi Ming Yang, visiting PhD student from the group of Prof. Keisuke Umakoshi in Nagasaki, Japan (left), Mrunal Nanda from Berhampur, India who joins for a RESOLV-funded research internship (middle), and new PostDoc Dr. Weichao Xue (right).
Dr. Weichao Xue performed his PhD in the group of Prof. Martin Oestreich at TU Berlin where he worked on catalysis with first-row transition metals. Afterwards, he joined the group of Prof. Jonathan Nitschke at Cambridge University with a DFG Walter Benjiamin Fellowship for working on metal-organic cages. His 6-month postdoctoral stay in our lab is funded by the Walter Benjamin Return Fellowship.

PhD student Laura Neukirch was awarded for her talk on donor-acceptor functionalized coordination cages at the “Tag der Chemie” at TU Dortmund. Congratulations!

Laura Schneider starts her Bachelor‘s thesis in the group of Prof. Jonathan Nitschke at the University of Cambridge, UK. She will work the synthesis and characterization of polycatenanes, whereby she applies her great expertise in mass spectrometry. We wish you a good time and much success!

Shota Hasegawa successfully defended his PhD thesis on coordination cages for fullerene encapsulation. Congratulations and all the best for the future!

We congratulate Qianqian Yan for defending her PhD thesis with great success! She worked on multi-component functionalized supramolecular assemblies. We wish you every success!

Time to say goodbye to 3 excellent postdoctoral researchers: Dr. Pedro Montes Tolentino, Dr. Ananya Baksi and Dr. Jacopo Tessarolo. We will miss you and wish all the best for your next career steps (and yes, there will be some nice papers following soon!). Thank you!

Elie Benchimol won a poster prize at the SupraChem 2022 in Mainz. Many congratulations for being awarded at this iconic conference.

We welcome Tom Comerford, visiting PhD student from the group of Eli Zysman-Colman, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Tom will join us for a couple of months to work on coordination cages functionalized with light-responsive compounds.

Julian Holstein and Lukas Stratmann went to Mosul, Iraq and participated in a teaching event from the DAAD resi.tu-dortmund.de  program. More information can be found in the corresponding tweet.

"Dr. Lukas Stratmann was awarded a Young Researcher Prize at the 4th CRC1093 International Symposium "Supramolecular Chemistry meets Biology" at University Duisburg-Essen for an outstanding publication (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2021, 60, 4939) within the field of the symposium's topics. In the VIP research article, precise intermolecular distances were measured in higher-order G-quadruplex structures such as dimers or sandwich complexes. The Clever Lab congratulates!

aaaaaaaand...

A second award at the CRC1093 International Symposium goes to the CleverLab! Dr. Irene Regeni won a Poster Prize for her work on metallo-supramolecular helicates for G-qaudruplex DNA recognition. Congrats to Irene!"

We are proud to welcome a new group member in the Clever Lab: Laura Neukirch joined as a fast-track PhD student and is funded by RESOLV. We are looking forward to work with you.

The Clever Lab is welcoming a new coworker. Chak-Shing Kwan joined the group as a postdoc. He was awarded with a prestigious Humboldt fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. We wish him all the best and success in his research in the Clever Lab.

We are happy to welcome a new mem­ber in the Clever Lab: PhD student Elie Benchimol. We wish him all the best for his research and we are looking forward to work with you!

„We say goodbye, thank you and wish all the best to Dr. Sonja Pullen who leaves the Clever Lab for starting her independent research career as a tenure track Assistant Professor at the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences, University of Amsterdam. Lots of luck and success, Sonja! Read more here

Dr. Sonja Pullen was featured in this research spotlight from the TU Dortmund. The interview is about her research topic on light-driven catalysis and her international research experience. Dr. Pullen also talks about the Marie Skłodowska-Curie-Fellowship (MSCA) from the European Union which made her stay in the Clever Lab possible. Read more here

We are happy to welcome three new members in the Clever Lab. Dr. Ananya Baksi (right) joins our group as a postdoc, PhD student Alexandre Walther (middle) and Dr. David Van Craen (left) as a young investigator who is conducting independent research on anion-binding helicates.

The Clever Lab congratulates our PhD student Irene Regeni for being one of the poster prize winners of the virtual ISMSC poster session 2020, where she presented her work on multy-cavity coordination cages.

We have to say goodbye to Dr. Haeri Lee, who starts her independend career at Hannam University in Daejeon, South Korea. All the best! We will be missing you!

Part of our JSPS-funded collaboration with the group of Keisuke Umakoshi, Nagasaki University, Japan, has just been accepted for publication: S. Horiuchi, C. Matsuo, E. Sakuda, Y. Arikawa, G. H. Clever, K. Umakoshi, Dalton. Trans. 2020, 49, 8472. (HOT article).
 

Congratulations to Irene Regeni for being selected to attend this year's 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting! In her PhD thesis, Irene works on dye-functionalized coordination cages and their application to DNA secondary structure recognition.

The Clever Lab wishes Merry Chistmas!!!

A brand-new JASCO CPL300 is now installed in our Lab, the first one in Germany! It enables us to measure Circularly Polarized Luminescence (CPL) of chiral compounds, cages and so on. The new machine is funded within the RESOLV Cluster of Excellence.

And again we are proud to welcome three new group members who will strengthen the Clever Lab: Dr. Pedro Montes Tolentino, postdoc from Mexico (left) and our new PhD students Hannah Kuckling and Simon Kotnig.

We are happy to welcome three new members in the Clever Lab: PhD student Shota Hasegawa from Japan and our bachelor students Rameeya Muraleetharan and Marie Langenberg. We are looking forward to work with you!

Congratulations to our PhD student Lukas Stratmann who was awarded a poster prize at the ICBIC19 in Interlaken, Switzerland, the biggest international conference on bioinorganic chemistry. He presented his project on EPR-based intermolecular distance measurements in higher-order DNA G-quadruplex structures which he is working on in collaboration with the group of JProf. Kasanmascheff from Physical Chemistry.

See this recent highlight of the Clever Lab research activities in self-assembly and fullerene binding in the UniZet magazine (in German).

Our PhD student Bin Chen won a IUPAC poster prize at ISMSC 2019 in Lecce, Italy, for his work on fullerene binding bowls recently published in JACS.

The Clever Lab congratulates!

Wie macht sich die Natur Übergangsmetall-Kationen zu Nutze? Welche Relevanz haben Selten Erdmetalle wie Europium und Gadolinium in biologischen Markierungsexperimenten und der medizinischen Bildgebung? Welche spannende Chemie kann in künstlichen Nanokäfigen auf Basis von Galliumkomplexen durchgeführt werden?

Hierzu konnte US Chemiker Ken Raymond in den letzten zwei Wochen als erster “Mercator Fellow” des GRK2376, in welchem sich Wissenschaftler von Ruhr-Uni Bochum und TU Dortmund mit chemischen Reaktionen in nanometergroßen Hohlräumen und Kompartimenten beschäftigen, spannende Antworten liefern.

Mehr hier.

Congratulations to PhD student Philip Punt who was awarded with the poster prize at the RESOLV Klausurtagung 2019 in Harsewinkel-Marienfeld for his work on “Imidazole-modified metal-binding DNA G-quadruplexes – a step towards artificial metalloenzymes”. In his work he could show how the introduction of imidazole residues in DNA G-quadruplexes leads to tunable metal-binding G-quadruplexes that are able to catalyze various reactions including Michael additions as well as Diels-Alder reactions.

Congratulations to PhD student Irene Regeni who was awarded with a poster prize at SupraChem 2019 in Würzburg. Her work on dye-based coordination cages was awarded in the category "Molecular Cages, Switches and Machines" and the prize offered from Springer was presented by Prof. Dr. Markus Albrecht, Editor of J. Incl. Phenom. Macrocycl. Chem..

We regularly conduct diffraction experiments at biomolecular synchrotron beamline P11@DESY for structure elucidation of large metallo-supramolecular assemblies. Two publications in Angew. Chem. on a new M₈L₁₆ catenane and cage-in-ring pseudo rotaxane were chosen as science highlight in the 2018 DESY annual report (p. 32 - 33)

We congratulate Irene Regeni who was awarded a poster prize on the Supe@Lyon 2018, a popular international symposium on supramolecular chemistry. She presented her interesting work with the title "Self-assembled [Pd₂L₄] coordination cages based on well-known organic dyes." The prize was handed over by Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart!

We are happy to welcome two new members in the Clever Lab: Dr. Sudhakar Ganta, postdoc coming from the IIT in Madras, India and our guest scientist Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Eri Sakuda from Nagasaki University in Japan.
Both will work on functional coordination cages.

Congratulations to Irene, Soham and Bo for winning the presentation prizes on the first edition of the International Clever Lab Conference!

The Clever Lab goes social!

Find our hottest news now also on Twitter.

Great news for RESOLV: The joint proposal by RUB and TU Dortmund University was selected by the DFG and the Cluster of Excellence in solvation science will be funded in Germany’s Excellence Strategy for the next seven years.

We happily announce that our recent paper on interpentrated peanut-shaped cages made it on the Front Cover of Angew. Chem.!

We welcome our two new lab members from the south of China: Qianqian Yan, PhD student coming with a CSC scholarship from Fuzhou University (right) and Dr. Kai Wu, postdoc coming from Sun Yat-Sen University (left). Both will work on functional coordination cages.

For this years scientific retreat, the Clever Lab crossed the north see to visit the island of Juist: Great landscapes, intense seminars and a lot of fun!

We are happy to announce that Haeri Lee from Korea starts her postdoc in the Clever Lab. Her expertise is X-ray crystallography and she will work on functionalized coordination cages.

The Clever Lab welcomes new postdoc Jacopo Tessarolo from Italy who will work on functionalized cages.

Our recent publication "Catenation and Aggregation of Multi-Cavity Coordination Cages" (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.) was highlighted by Dr. Emiliano Feresin with a short article on the website of the RESOLV cluster of excellence.

Dr. Sonja Pullen started her project entitled „Metal Organic Cages for Catalysis Applications” (short „MOCCA“) that is funded by the European Union within the framework of Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (MSCA). She will work on functional heteroleptic coordination cages for CO₂ reduction.

The Clever Lab congratulates Philip Punt for winning a poster prize at the RESOLV retreat 2018. On his poster with the title “Imidazole-modified metal-binding DNA G-quadruplexes - a step towards artificial metalloenzymes” he showed how to create designed coordination environments for metal ions on top of G-quadruplex structures.

Our recent publication "Hierarchical Assembly of an Interlocked M₈L₁₆ Container" (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.) was highlighted on the website of the RESOLV cluster of excellence. In a short interview, Guido Clever explains the significance of his new discovery described in this paper.

The Clever Lab is looking forward to start collecting diffraction data for crystal structure elucidations on its new Bruker D8 Venture single crystal X-ray diffractometer.

We welcome our guest scientists Assist.-Prof. Dr. Shinnosuke Horiuchi and Assist.-Prof. Dr. Hironobu Tahara, both from the University of Nagasaki, Japan, in our group.

The Clever Lab is looking forward to start its measurements on the new Bruker AV 500 Avance NEO NMR spectrometer.

We are excited to start the operation of our new Bruker timsTOF ion mobility mass spectrometer.

The Clever Lab congratulates Irene Regeni for obtaining a PhD scholarship from the German Fonds of the Chemical Industry (FCI Kekulé stipend) to support her work on dye-functionalized coordination cages.

We congratulate Marcel Krick who was awarded a poster prize on the ISMSC 2017 in Cambridge, the biggest international symposium on supramolecular chemistry. He presented his work with the title “Endohedral Dynamics of Push-Pull Rotor-Functionalized Cages.“

Susanne Löffler won the Young Researcher Award 2016 at the 7th Münster Symposium on Cooperative Effects in Chemistry (MSCEC) for her outstanding publication (JACS 2015, 137, 1060) exhibiting the control of host guest chemistry in supramolecular coordination cages. The Clever Lab congratulates!