Prof. Rickhaus brings home a prestigious SNSF Starting Grant 2023

Prof. Michel Rickhaus. 2023 UNIGE. 

A dimensional leap!

Professor Michel Rickhaus from the Department of Organic Chemistry brings home a prestigious SNSF Starting Grant 2023. This success comes on the heels of his call to the University and the award of a fellowship by the Sandoz Family Foundation. The grant has a budget of up to 1.8M CHF.

Professor Rickhaus is a molecular architect, who bends and twists small molecules into precisely defined 3D shapes. Those then come together to create superstructures with unique abilities like transporting charge and light. What sets these systems apart is their dynamic nature —they can react to their surroundings and stimuli, be recycled, and self-heal. A key driver for Professor Rickhaus is emergence: that the (functional) ensemble is more than the sum of its members. His groundbreaking work not only delves into the synthesis of molecular architectures but also explores their transformative potential as next-generation materials

Biography

Michel Rickhaus (*1985, Switzerland) received his Master’s degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of Basel (2011, with honours). During that time, he was working with Prof. Lawrence T. Scott in Boston College (USA, 2010) as a visiting scholar, before beginning his PhD studies with Prof. Marcel Mayor (2011-2015, summa cum laude) at the University of Basel on helical polyaromatics. He then joined Dr. med. Johannes Beck as a research associate (2015-2016, Swiss Civil Service) working on depression predictors in sleep stages. From 2016 to 2019, Michel was a SNSF funded postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University with Prof. Harry L. Anderson investigating non-planar π-conjugation in porphyrin rings and related topologies. In August 2019, Michel started his independent research as group leader (SNSF Ambizione) at the University of Zurich. In August 2023, following his call to the University of Geneva, Michel has begun his position at the University of Geneva as a Sandoz assistant professor for organic chemistry.