What goes on in our lab? Any news and updates regarding our group can be found here.
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…
Potential Energy @ Chem
The last major work with the Moran lab just got published in Chem, where we report the nonenzymatic reduction of keto acids by the coenzyme NADH. Accompanying this paper is a small author profile of what got me to this project and into chemistry/academia in general within Chem’s “Potential Energy” format. You can find it…
MOM 2024
Last week, Dieter Braun and his team organized an amazing conference on the molecular origins of life at LMU (https://indico.physik.uni-muenchen.de/event/396/). We saw two days of outstanding talks on how different disciplines can approach the question of the emergence of life, and Robert gave a lecture on “A Mechanistic Approach to Prebiotic Chemistry: Coenzymes, Chirality, and…
Getting ready for fast measurements!
With a double-mixing stopped-flow spectrometer, another dedicated instrument made it onto the lab’s bench. This instrument will allow to follow fast reactions from the millisecond to second time region.
Andrew joins the lab
Visiting from the Boekhoven lab, the Andrew+ pipetting robot started occupying the bench of the Mayer lab this week. Andrew will set up many of the lab’s experiments and will be used to prepare large-scale kinetic assays in an automated way.
Mayer lab at Technische Universität München 