Panel A: Retreat 2025

As the second retreat group, Panel A (Theoretical/Computational Chemistry and Functional/Sustainable Materials) also had their retreat in the middle of vineyards at Hannersdorf from March 5–7, 2025 and enjoyed the marvelous sunny weather outdoors! 

The retreat was organized by: 

  • Prof. Ivo Hofacker (Theoretical Chemistry)
  • Robert Richstein (Inorganic Chemistry, Reithofer group)
  • Martin Sahul (Functional Materials and Catalysis, Min Chin group)

This year, Prof. Peter Lieberzeit (Physical Chemistry) and Lingcong Ge (Inorganic Chemistry, Reithofer group) once again took many great pictures, capturing wonderful moments of interaction and your portraits. You can find them all on Moodle (Panel A Retreat 2025 – Photo Gallery)—here, we’ve selected just a few! Please give them credit if you intend to publish them elsewhere.

We invite you to “take a tour” and view some highlights of the 2025 Panel A retreat!

 

 

Panel A Retreat: group picture with students, supervisors and invited guest speakers outside the venue

Panel A Retreat: group picture with students, supervisors and invited guest speakers outside the venue

Career Talk with representatives of academia and industry

While our principal investigators Prof. Ellen Backus (Head of DoSChem, Physical Chemistry) and Prof. Robert Woodward (Materials Chemistry) provided an unplugged insight in their professional background and stand question and answer about ups & downs of an academic career, Dr. Alexandra Romina Albunia (Senior Group Expert, Borealis) was covering the industry career path.

Panel A invited guest speakers

  • Prof. Sanket Goel (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India) covering the topic: Miniaturized Biosensor Prototypes
  • Dr. Alexandra Romina Albunia (Senior Group Expert, Borealis) covering the topic: Shaping the Future through Innovation: Needs and Challenges
  • Dr. Youven Benseghir (Functional Materials and Catalysis, UniVie), covering the topic: Metal-organic Frameworks: A Platform for Heterogeneous Catalysis
  • Dr. Philipp Dexheimer (Science Artist), covering the topic: The AI Academic Assistant – Everyday Use Cases for Scientists

Photos of activities

The retreat also featured a guided tour of Friedensburg Schlaining, a 13th-century "peace castle" where participants explored the historic site, the experience was perfectly rounded off with an atmospheric tasting of local wines and plenty of networking. The final day featured Dr. Philipp Dexheimer’s online talk on AI applications in scientific research.

For more details, please review the program.

Discussions

Poster Session

  • Brigitta Bachmair (González group, Theoretical Chemistry), Unraveling the Rare NH + H2 Ammonia Photodissociation Pathway via Nonadiabatic Simulations.
  • Lorenz Grünewald (González group, Theoretical Chemistry), How do molecules actually get excited? A new laser excitation scheme in SHARC.

 

 

 

Best Poster

Best Talk Awards

  • Manuel Hofman (Backus group, Physical Chemistry), Structure of acetone at the air-water interface.
  • Dóra Vörös (Gonzáles group, Theoretical Chemistry), Silica Surface Interactions Driving Photophysical and Photochemical Modiulations in a Push-Pull Stilbene And I am doing Theoretical chemistry.

A huge “thank you” to Robert and Martin for the joint force in confident mastering the organization!  You did a great job! 

If you have participated in the retreat and would like to provide meaningful feedback, please visit the Moodle survey.

So far, there are some of your survey feedback highlights: 

  • “Location was amazing, the workshop (AI) and the career panel with industry members were really really nice, I think having external workshop leaders and industry partners as part of the retreat really enhances the experience”
  • “…it helped me see how I could use AI as a useful tool in my scientific work. I also think it was a nice addition in a career outlook aspect, since Philip Dexheimer is not in a classical "research in academia or industry" career, which I found a valuable outlook”.
  • “This was maybe the best part out of all the informative contributions to the panel, getting to know more about these inspiring people, how they tackled all the challanges in their life and also with the possibility of asking questions, very interesting!”

Next time we will look into “yoga option” and we were not aware of those shared doubled beds (sorry!) since the venue actively promotes their location for professional seminars!