Celebrating the first German-Indian Research Training Group

11/05/2024

Frank Würthner and his Indian colleague Mahesh Hariharan were invited to present their joint Research Training Group at an anniversary celebration in Delhi.

Celebration in Delhi (f.l.t.r): Professor Mahesh Hariharan with the Indian Minister for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh, Federal Minister of Education and Research Bettina Stark-Watzinger with Professor Frank Würthner. (Image: Goyal Photo)

In May 2024, the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced that it would fund a new German-Indian Research Training Group in Chemistry with 7.4 million euros. Research Training Groups offer a structured training to doctoral students who work together on various aspects of a broader topic.

The spokespersons of the new Research Training Group are Professors Frank Würthner, Head of the Center for Nanosystems Chemistry at the University of Würzburg, and Mahesh Hariharan from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram (IISER TVM).

On October 24, 2024, Würthner and Hariharan were invited to present the Research Training Group at an outstanding celebration in India: the Golden Jubilee Celebration of Indo-German cooperation in science and technology. The celebration was held in the capital Delhi by the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology (DST) together with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German science organisations DFG, DAAD, Fraunhofer and Helmholtz (DESY).

First jointly funded Research Training Group

As spokespersons for the first international Research Training Group jointly funded by the DST and the DFG, Professors Hariharan and Würthner were presented with the award certificates for their project by the Federal Minister of Education and Research and the Minister for Science and Technology during the event. In the afternoon, they were given the opportunity to present their research topic and their plans for long-term cooperation between their institutions in a twenty-minute lecture.

What particularly pleased the two speakers was that several speakers described the Research Training Group as a lighthouse project and model for future German-Indian cooperation, in which both sides send their employees to the partner institution for a longer period of time and enable them to graduate with a dual doctoral degree.

Research Topic of the Research Training Group

The Research Training Group "Photoluminescence in Supramolecular Matrices", which was officially launched on November 1, 2024, offers positions for 32 doctoral students. Photoluminescence is the property of molecules to emit light after absorbing energy. Such molecules are used in medical imaging, analytical chemistry or in light-emitting displays.

In recent years, it has been found that the matrix in which photoluminescent molecules are embedded can have a major influence on their properties and in particular modulate the transitions between singlet and triplet states. This potential is to be explored in the Research Training Group for controlling the colour, intensity and duration of the emission.