LAC news

Dr. Nathalie M. Grob, currently Postdoctoral Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Peptide-based Drug Discovery. Nathalie M. Grob’s research involves developing efficient methods of discovering new, peptide-based medications. Her teaching and research have a particular focus on pathologies that principally affect women and have been little studied to date. She was awarded an SNSF Starting Grant for her work.

To celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science in February, D-CHAB, in partnership with EducETH and WiNS, invited interested schoolgirls to look behind the scenes of the department on February 14, 2024. Here is a review of an afternoon full of bright, colorful, sustainable, and applied chemistry, from nanocrystals to artificial hearts.

Artificial intelligence and automated laboratory infrastructure are massively accelerating the development of new chemical catalysts. With these tools, researchers led by Paco Laveille (Swiss Cat+, D-CHAB) are developing catalysts for efficiently and cost-​effectively synthesising the energy source methanol from CO₂.

Amy E. Fraley, Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH, is appointed as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the D-CHAB. Her research focuses on the biosynthesis of natural products and combines fundamental evolutionary questions with new biotechnological applications. Hansjörg Grützmacher, Full Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at D-CHAB, is going to retire in July 2024. Hansjörg Grützmacher joined ETH in 1995. His research focuses on new molecules with unusual bonding properties.

Researchers from ETH Zurich, among them Maksym Kovalenko, Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology, and Stanford have taken snapshots of the crystal structure of perovskite nanocrystals as it was deformed by excited electrons. To their surprise, the deformation straightened out the skewed crystal structure rather than making it more disordered.