Mats Simmermacher

Mats is a senior postdoc and an expert on light-matter interaction, in particular on non-resonant x-ray scattering. He is developing theory and computational tools to simulate novel scattering experiments, most notably for imaging the ultrafast, light-triggered motion of electrons in atoms and molecules. Based on a proposal he wrote together with Adam, he is currently funded by the EPSRC.

Mats studied Chemistry at the Justus Liebig University Gießen, Germany, and at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was awarded an Academic Excellence Scholarship of the Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark, where he obtained his PhD under supervision of Klaus B. Møller and Niels E. Henriksen in 2018. Since then, he worked as a Lecturer in Chemical Physics and as a PDRA at the University of Edinburgh. Collaborating closely with the experimental group of Peter M. Weber at Brown University, United States of America, he received the prestigious RSC Horizon Prize "for the development of ultrafast x-ray scattering for studying chemical dynamics and structure in photo-excited molecules" in 2021. Mats is furthermore an elected member of a selection committee for scholarships funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. He moved with our group from Edinburgh to Oxford in September 2022.