A profile of Professor Martin Suhm

Professor Martin A. Suhm was born in 1962 in Germany and grew up in Portugal. He received his chemical education at the University of Karlsruhe, finishing in 1985 with a diploma thesis on nuclear magnetic relaxation. After a DAAD research year on quantum Monte Carlo methods for water clusters with R. O. Watts at the Australian National University in Canberra, he joined the group of M. Quack at ETH Zürich, where he completed a PhD thesis on the far infrared spectroscopy and dynamics of the hydrogen fluoride dimer in 1990. During research stays with D. J. Nesbitt at JILA in Boulder, Colorado (1991, 1992) and back at ETH, he aimed at a detailed understanding of the unusual clustering tendency of HF, which serves as a simple prototype for hydrogen bonding. After completing his habilitation (1995, awarded with a Latsis University prize and an ADUC habilitation prize) and a Dozentenstipendium (Fonds der Chemischen Industrie, 1997), he was appointed full professor at the University of Göttingen in 1997. Since 2002, he has been coordinating a DFG research training group on the spectroscopy and dynamics of molecular coils and aggregates (www.pcgg.de). He served as director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry (2000–02), as Dean of Studies of the Chemistry Faculty (2003–05) and as board member of the Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry (2002–06). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and member of several other scientific societies. His research interests focus on hydrogen bond dynamics in systems of increasing complexity, with special emphasis on the vibrational spectroscopy of hydrogen-bonded clusters generated in supersonic jet expansions and on molecular recognition phenomena. He is author of over 70 publications in international journals, more than 20 of them in PCCP and other RSC journals.

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