Bogdan Dereka (Image: Jos Schmid)
The EFFICACY project (Electric Field eFfects In Chemistry And CatalYsis), will be led by Assistant Professor Bogdan Dereka, who is currently a group leader for Molecular Photochemistry and Photophysics at the Department of Chemistry, The University of Zürich, aims to understand the microscopic characteristics, dynamics and role of electric fields in chemistry at a fundamental level. Together with his team, Bogdan seeks to uncover the ground rules of how these fields can be characterized and manipulated in a predictable and broadly usable manner – paving the way for electrically programming chemical reactivity without consuming electrons.
The ERC Starting Grants program provides funding for research projects with a maximum budget of €1.5 million over a period of up to five years. Dr Dereka received an additional start-up fund to cover building a new ultrafast laser laboratory, thus the total funding of his ERC support is €2.5 million. This prestigious award is designed to support exceptional researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, build research teams, and pursue their most promising ideas. In this round the success rate was approximately 12,2%.
Bogdan Dereka was born and trained in Ukraine. He received his B.Sc. in Organic Chemistry in 2012 and M.Sc. in Physical Organic Chemistry in 2013 from the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Bogdan carried out his PhD research investigating excited-state symmetry breaking in multipolar organic molecules in the group of Prof. Eric Vauthey at the University of Geneva and defended his PhD thesis in 2018, for which he was awarded the European Photochemistry Association PhD Prize as the best PhD thesis in 2018-2020. He stayed briefly as a postdoc in the same group and worked with Prof. Andrei Tokmakoff at the University of Chicago (SNSF Postdoc.Mobility). In his postdoctoral work, he studied battery electrolytes and strong hydrogen bonds. His work on crossover from hydrogen to chemical bonding (Science 2021, 371, 160) was recognized by C&EN magazine as one of the highlight scientific discoveries in 2021. In February 2022, Bogdan started his independent research as a group leader (supported by the SNSF Ambizione grant) at the University of Zürich.
Some other news on ERC awardees of Ukrainian origin can be found here