Niyas Mundakkamattathil Abdul Salam, a former PhD student of the Würthner group, received one of the two first SupraChem PhD Awards during the SupraChem 2026 Conference in Dortmund (March 8–10).

It was only last year that the GDCh (German Chemical Society) established the Supramolecular Chemistry Working Group, which now takes responsibility for the organization of the SupraChem conferences and awards two prizes for outstanding doctoral theses in the field of supramolecular chemistry completed at research institutions in Germany every second year at the SupraChem conference.

As Professor Carsten Schmuck (1968–2019), a former professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry in Würzburg, initiated the first SupraChem Conference in 2011 in Essen, followed every second year at different locations (2019 in Würzburg), this young investigator award is dedicated “in memory of Professor Carsten Schmuck”.

This year’s award goes to Niyas Mundakkamattathil Abdul Salam, a former PhD student of the Würthner group, who completed his thesis entitled “π-Stacked Supramolecular Complexes of Nanographene Multiimides” at the end of 2024. The second PhD award went to Elie Benchimol, who completed her PhD with Prof. Guido Clever (TU Dortmund). The SupraChem PhD Award can be seen as a German equivalent to the well-established British Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry (MASC) PhD thesis prize, which has recently been awarded to Jiarong Wu, another PhD graduate from the Institute of Organic Chemistry in Würzburg (Greenfield group).

Coming from IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India, where he received his MSc in Chemistry, M. A. Niyas showed exceptional skill and dedication in contributing to a variety of exciting projects. During his PhD studies, this resulted in four high-quality first-author publications on large nanographene host systems for the binding of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (Nat. Chem. 2022, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024), pigments (Angew. Chem. 2023), NIR phosphorescence sensitisers (Angew. Chem. 2024), and halide ions (Nature 2025). The latter work is considered particularly important, as it demonstrated for the first time that a hole created by one missing benzene unit within a nanographene layer is sufficient to enable the barrierless penetration of fluoride as well as chloride and bromide, but not iodide. These insights may therefore stimulate the fabrication of desalination membranes based on perforated ultrathin graphene membranes.

Niyas is currently in Oxford on a Newton Postdoctoral Fellowship with Prof. Molly Stevens and has recently been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to continue his research there for a total of four years.

We congratulate him on this award and wish him all the best for his future career.