Dirk M. Guldi completed both his undergraduate studies (1988) and PhD (1990) at the University of Cologne (Germany). Following postdoctoral appointments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA), the Hahn-Meitner Institute Berlin (1992), and Syracuse University, he joined the faculty of the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory in 1995. He was promoted a year later from assistant to associate professional specialist, and remained affiliated to Notre Dame until 2004. Since 2004, he is Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen. Since 2018, Dirk M. Guldi is Co-Editor in Chief of Nanoscale and Nanoscale Horizons and he has been named among the world’s Highly Cited Researchers by Thomson Reuters.
The Guldi group and its network belong to the cutting edge of worldwide research in solar-energy conversion with expertise not only in advanced photon- and charge-management without losing sight of the ultimate objective of developing integrated solar energy-to-chemical fuel conversion systems, which in the future can be utilized in real devices. Impressive documentations of their accomplishments are more than 700 peer-reviewed publications, far more than 48,000 citations, and an h-index of 107. At the heart is always a multifaceted and interdisciplinary research program, where his group designs, conceptually devises, synthesizes, tests, and characterizes novel nanometer scale materials with the objective of using them in solar energy conversion schemes.
A broad range of spectroscopic (i.e. time-resolved and steady-state measurements with spectrophotometric detection covering a time range from femtoseconds to minutes) and microscopic techniques (i.e. scanning probe microscopy, electron microscopy) are routinely employed to address aspects that correspond to the optimization and fine-tuning of dynamics and/or efficiencies of charge separation, charge transport, charge shift, and charge recombination processes.