Julia Reisenbauer receives Prix Schläfli 2024
Julia Reisenbauer has been honored with the Prix Schläfli Chemistry for her dissertation on "skeletal editing," which she completed at ETH Zurich. Her work involves the targeted rebuilding of molecules so they can perform specific functions.
Julia Reisenbauer, former doctoral student in the Morandi Group at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, operates like a surgeon on molecular skeletons, so to speak, especially on that of indole. Indoles occur very frequently in nature and also in the human body – for example, in the side chain of tryptophan, a naturally occurring amino acid. They form the basis for many pharmaceutical and industrial applications.
Reisenbauer has succeeded in extending the five-membered ring with an additional nitrogen atom. The new method could enable active ingredients to be found and tested much faster in the future because the protracted de novo synthesis can be bypassed. The result is that new classes of molecules can be created directly in just a few synthesis steps.
As she points out in an interview with Scnat, her fascination with basic research and desire "to understand mechanisms that can help us think in new directions and try out new things" are the driving forces behind her work.
The Prix Schläfli prizewinner has since received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and has been working at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena since September 2023.
Find more information about Julia Reisenbauer and her research in this external pageScnat article.