High pressure pair distribution function measurements in diamond anvil cells for the analysis of the local structure of compounds consisting of small molecules and their reaction products under extreme conditions.

It was a great honor to be awarded the Ludo Frevel Scholarship in 2013, and I am grateful to the ICDD for supporting me. I received the award when I was halfway through my PhD in Crystallography. Powder X-ray diffraction and pair distribution function analyses have already been of importance to me before I even started my PhD. The award of the scholarship was a huge motivation, and a sign that the study of materials, especially of non-crystalline materials, under extreme conditions seemed to be of interest to the community. The apparent great impact of this research encouraged me to submit a research proposal to the German Research Foundation, where I applied for my own position at the Goethe University to continue my research in this interesting field as a PostDoc. The award was particularly helpful as it provided me with the freedom to attend more conferences and to be more creative in the laboratory, i. e. to be able to try more things with a larger variety of chemicals. My reactants were mostly quite expensive gas mixtures, and with the additional funding, I did not have to worry about costs for these consumables. The scholarship also helped offset the costs for expensive textbooks and fees demanded for graduation, printing costs, etc. The self-confidence that I built up after receiving the Ludo Frevel Crystallography Scholarship also led to even more honors, such as the Robert L. Snyder Student Travel Grant Award (Denver X-ray Conference) and the highly respected award from the Adolf Messer foundation.

My PhD studies at the Institute of Geoscience of the Goethe University, under supervision of Prof. Björn Winkler, focused on the optimization of high pressure pair distribution function measurements in diamond anvil cells at the Extreme Conditions Beamline at PETRA III, DESY. Furthermore, I tried to understand the atomic structure of non-crystalline reaction products of small molecules such as CO or SF₆ under extreme pressures and temperatures by applying the pair distribution function and spectroscopic techniques. I received my doctoral degree in June 2014, and shortly after that the German Research Foundation awarded me funding for my own position for three years at the Goethe University. During my ongoing post-doctoral studies, I plan to extend the knowledge on chemical reactions at extreme conditions. The compounds that I chose consist of small organic molecules, and I am particularly interested on the influence of different carbon-to-nitrogen ratios on reaction products in order to find new materials and to understand their formation.