Sijbren Otto

About me

The CBBC presents an excellent platform and opportunity for academia and industry to embark on new joint lines of research that should lead to the breakthrough, technologies and products of the future. It will be very exciting to be able to contribute to such breakthroughs in the areas of materials and catalysis and/or their combination. Areas of particular interest include self-organizing, adaptive and self-healing materials, catalysis in water and combinatorial and Darwinian approaches to these challenges.

About my research

We are one of the leading groups internationally in the new field of Systems Chemistry, where the focus is on emergent properties that arise from many molecules interacting and/or reacting together. In complex molecular systems the whole can be much more than the sum of the parts. We have already reported such emergent phenomena in different areas, including catalysis and materials science. As part of this effort we have successfully developed combinatorial and Darwinian strategies to discover new materials and catalysts with unique properties.