Things are going extraordinary well for Jake Greenfield, who came to the University of Würzburg as a postdoc in summer 2022 and was then given the opportunity to set up his own junior research group in April 2023 as a Liebig fellow of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie. Since then, he and his small team have achieved remarkable things. In addition to the successful applications for research fellowships and funding, there are already seven publications to mention, all of which have appeared in high-impact journals, testifying to the high productivity and quality of the junior research group. Alongside Jake Greenfield, his doctoral student Jiarong Wu has played a key role in all these publications.

Jiarong Wu

Jake Greenfield was already impressed by Jiarong Wu's extraordinary motivation at Imperial College London. She did not hesitate to follow him to Würzburg to complete her doctorate under his supervision. She is now the first author of the seven publications mentioned above, has already won three poster prizes at international conferences and was recently awarded the Chinese-German Chemical Association (CGCA) PhD Prize 2025 in Berlin..

Jake Greenfield

After graduating with honours from Imperial College London, Jake Greenfield completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK) before returning to Imperial College as a postdoctoral researcher. Since moving to the excellently equipped laboratories of the Chair of Organic Chemistry II and the Center for Nanosystems Chemistry at the University of Würzburg, he first received a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, shortly afterwards the Liebig Fellowship from the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie and the ADUC Lecture Award 2025 at his first participation in the German Chemiedozententagung.

Helical Out-of-Equilibrium Systems: Exploring Light-Induced Structural Distortions (HeliOS)

This is the title of Jake Greenfield's successful application to the European Research Council (ERC). The official press release from the University of Würzburg describes the project in layman's terms: Nature offers striking examples of how spring-like structures store and release energy: some seed pods use this strategy to literally explode and disperse their contents far and wide. Inspired by these principles, Jake Greenfield is investigating how spiral-shaped molecules can be deformed in his ERC project HeliOS. To achieve this, he couples the spirals with light switches – molecules that reversibly change their structure under the influence of light. In addition to the widely used azo-based switches, next-generation imine-based switches developed by Greenfield's team and at the Center for Nanosystems Chemistry at JMU are also being used. The aim of the project is to develop light-sensitive spiral molecules and precisely control their properties with light pulses. Among other things, this could enable new strategies for energy storage.

Contact

Dr Jake Greenfield, jake.greenfield@uni-wuerzburg.de

to the website of the Greenfield working group

By C. Stadler