Welcome to the Mastalerz Group

07.07.2026 - Double PhD Defense!

Congrats to Lisa Roß and Moritz P. Schuldt to the successful defenses of their PhD theses! Lisa an Moritz defended on the same day back to back. 

Lisa wrote her thesis about the "Impact of Triptycene-Inspired End Caps on Aggregation and Packing Behaviour". 

In her thesis, Lisa created different three-dimensional end caps for condensation reactions toward extended π-systems such as quinoxalinophenanthraphenazines (QPPs) and used them as synthons in crystal engineering. Using this approach, she was able to systematically study and control the packing of different barrelene based systems and investigated extended QPPs with up to four triptycene moieties. For the latter a strong aggregation tendency was found in solid state structures and Lisa used collision-induced dissociation in tandem mass spectrometry in collaboration with Dr. Jürgen Gross to understand the supramolecular forces and introduction a new analytical method to our group's tool box.

Moritz' investigated ways "Towards Planar and Tubular Haeckelites" in his thesis.

During his studies, he re-discovered a dimerization of fluorene based dialkynes on his way toward circumazulene. He investigated the resulting butafulvenes in respect of their aromaticity and was able to get deeper insights in the corresponding mechanism but systematic structural changes as well as quantum chemical calculations. He also teamed up with our former co-worker Dr. Dennis Reinhard and they shed a little more light into the on-going discussion about the exact nature of the broadly used Scholl oxidation. For this purpose, they studied differently substituted 1,2-terphenyls experimentally as well as quantum chemically. Moritz furthermore intensively worked on macrocyclic systems. Doing so, he was able to synthesize precursors of cyclo-9,10-anthrylene-paraphenylenes with up to 36 units in the macrocyclic system and was able to obtain single crystal X-ray structures of most of these compounds. In another study, he developed a way to obtain enantiopure [3]cyclorubicenes and investigated their chiroptical properties in detail. The corresponding gabs-values are among the highest reported for nanohoops so far and his synthetic strategy will lead to further work toward Haeckelite type nanobelts and tubes in the near future. Moritz is furthermore the mastermind behind countless quantum chemical calculations in our group and we are happy to announce, that he will join us as a post-doc later this month.

It was a pleasure for us to be a part of Lisa's academic journey, we wish her all the best for her future, thank her for everything she did for the group and she will be missed as a member of our team.
All of the above is also true for Moritz, yet since he will join our group as post-doc, the goodbye is of course postponed.

01.07.2026 - Paper accepted

Congrats to Dennis and Melanie!

Their paper on the Post-Modification of Tripyrenylenes to Enantiopure π-Extended D₃-Symmetric Propellers got accepted in Chem. Eur. J.!

In the paper, a tripyrenylene we developed in an earlier study was investigated in respect to its isomerization behavior as well as post-functionalization. By oxidation and subsequent condensation π- extended propeller-shaped PAHs have been obtained. Due to hindered racemization, we were able to separate the enantiomers and to study their chiroptical properties as well as solid state structures. We also want to thank the other team members involved in this project.

If you are interested in the story, click here or directly on the picture on the left.

Great job Dennis and Mel!

29.05.2026 - Mastalerz Group at KOPO 2026

Liping, Moritz, Cornelius and Michael were visiting the 13th workshop on conjugated oligomers and polymers (KOPO 26) in Bad Honnef. Our group has a long tradition contributing to this meeting and this year was the first year Michael was co-organizing it (stay tuned for future news on that....).

Liping and Moritz gave an excellent talks about "Chirality-assisted synthesis of conjugated carbon nanobelts" and "Towards Planar and Tubular Haeckelites" and Cornelius presented a poster on his current topic.

We would like to thank everybody that joined this beautiful meeting and are looking forward to the next KOPO!

Thanks to Teresa Nitschke who holds the copyright on the photos of Liping and Moritz.

26.05.2026 - Farewell to Sairam

We would like to say farewell to Sairam.

Sairam worked on our ERC-funded TACY project and one of his projects was recently awarded with a poster price at SupraChem 2026 in Dortmund.

Stay tuned for the publications to come.

We want to thank Sairam for the knowledge he brought to the group and himSairam all the best for his scientific career and look forward to see him again in the future.

Thank you for everything!

05.05.2026 - New  Group Member

We would like to welcome our newest PhD-candidate Faiza.

Faiza Khan obtained her B.Sc. from the GCUF in Faisalabad, Pakistan, followed by a M.Sc. from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. In her master studies she worked on iron photocatalysed radical carbon-hydrogen functionalization via LMCTunder the supervision of jun. Prof. Dr. Ala Bunescu.

Faiza will work on organic cage compounds for ion sensing within the RTG 2948-Mixed Ionic Electronic Transport and will try to explore ions of different geometry.