What goes on in our lab? Any news and updates regarding our group can be found here.
The MayerLab at the CCSC2026
Last week, the whole team of the MayerLab attended the Chemical Compound Space Conference 2026 (CCSC) in Munich, which was co-organized by Robert. The conference, held at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW), brought together an interdisciplinary group of scientists from theoretical and experimental chemistry, physics, and computer science to discuss how large…
New Members!
In March, Milena and Maciek joined the team for their master’s thesis and postdoctoral project, respectively. Milena joins us from EPFL and will explore the use of robotics for exploring kinetic reaction spaces. Maciek previously completed his PhD at the Universté de Strasbourg with Joseph Moran, and has secured a highly competitive Walter-Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship…
Have a Look at Our New Lab!
Whereas the first pictures of our new lab in TUM’s Catalysis Research Center (CRC) still looked chaotic and were full of boxes, we have finished unboxing in the meantime. Since mid-February, we have been fully operational and have added a few further instruments to our repertoire.
Moving to the Catalysis Research Center (CRC)
The beginning of January marked a further milestone for our team: we moved to our own labs at the Catalysis Research Center (CRC) at TUM. At the CRC, we have now combined both our instrumentation for automation and kinetics in a single place and are up and running again. Of course, moving out of an…
2025 Recap
2025 marked the second year of the Mayer Lab at TUM. With the generous support of the Boekhoven team in hosting us, the lab has continued to grow steadily while exploring the synergy of automation, computation, and organic chemistry. Over the course of the year, three students completed or began their Master’s thesis projects (Yanyan…
Robert is now a Professor at TUM
On 01.12.2025, Robert was appointed as W2 Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Assistant Professor for Physical-Organic Chemistry of Catalysis at the Department of Chemistry at the TUM School of Natural Sciences. This marks a few changes to our lab: after nearly two years attached to the Chair of Supramolecular Chemistry of Job Boekhoven, our team will become…
New Members!
At the start of November, Natalie and Felix joined the team for their master’s thesis and PhD projects, respectively. Welcome back and have a great start!
ESOR 2025
This September, the group visited the European Symposium on Organic Reactivity (ESOR) in Padova, where Robert provided an overview of the lab’s research in a talk and Stefan presented his PhD work in a poster. Even better, Stefan’s poster got awarded the poster prize from Wiley – congratulations!
New Instruments!
Thanks to the support of the Emmy-Noether programme, our lab now has a dedicated stopped-flow system for running semi-automated kinetic studies down to the millisecond time regime.
Emmy-Noether Program
Exciting news: we got accepted into the Emmy-Noether program of the DFG (German Research Foundation), which will support our research on understanding complex catalytic reactions in water with 2.1 Mio € in the upcoming 6 years.
Robotic Support
Thanks to the generous support from the ORIGINS excellence cluster, our ambition to automate physical organic chemistry for studying complex catalytic reactions got support. Our lab is joined by a second Andrew+ liquid handling robot to handle the ever-increasing number of reactions.
Teaching: Physical-Organic Chemistry
Starting this winter term, TUM will have its first-ever module on physical-organic chemistry organized by Robert, an elective for the M.Sc. chemistry program. For more information and registration, check out the M.Sc. chemistry curriculum as well as the module description in TUM online: https://academics.nat.tum.de/org/mh/details/mod/NAT0200 Lectures take place every Monday from 13:30-15:00 in the Ivar-Ugi lecture…
Mayer lab at Technische Universität München 