ERC Starting Grant for Prince Ravat

We live in an age of miniaturization. The goal: to build ever smaller and more efficient optical, electronic and mechanical devices. Therefore, the demand for multifunctional materials able to respond to several external stimuli at the same time is increasing.

Dr. Prince Ravat, junior research group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg, is taking on this challenge. He is now receiving prestigious support for his project: The European Research Council (ERC) has granted him a Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros. This award is presented to outstanding young researchers in a Europe-wide competition. The project is scheduled to start in the next six months with a duration of five years.

Designing, synthesizing, and testing materials

Ravat and his co-workers want to make use of chirality. A property of molecules related to their symmetry. The introduction of chirality into functional materials gives them unique properties, such as the absorption and emission of circularly polarized light and spin-selective charge transport. As a result, materials with completely new functions can be designed.

"As scientists in synthetic chemistry, we are interested in the development of new molecules with specific applications. As part of this project, we will design and synthesize novel functional chiral materials and then test their optoelectronic and charge transport properties," explains Ravat.

The goal of the JMU team is the development of chiral organic semiconductors that use both the charge and the spin (self-rotation) of the charge carriers. These are important for the development of the next generation of optoelectronics, for example for spin LEDs, 3D displays and quantum-based optical computing technology. Regular (achiral) organic semiconductors are already well established, but research on chiral organic semiconductors is still at an early stage.

Career of the ERC award winner

Prince Ravat, born in 1986 in Vadodara (India), studied chemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (Vadodara, India). He then worked at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune (India) and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, where he received his PhD with summa cum laude in 2014. He then worked as a postdoc at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and at the University of Tokyo (Japan).

In 2018, Ravat got the chance to participate in the JMU’s "Excellent Ideas Program" and has since been a junior research group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry. In his career, he has already received numerous awards and scholarships – most recently the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award 2022 and admission to the Emil Fischer Fellowship Program in 2021.

Weblinks

Ravat group at JMU

Contact

Dr. Prince Ravat, Institut für Organische Chemie, Universität Würzburg, phone +49 931 – 31 81583, princekumar.ravat@uni-wuerzburg.de