Matthias Driess
Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, Technische Universität Berlin, Coordinator of the Cluster of Excellence “Unifying Concepts in Catalysis”, Berlin; Team leader of the Research Unit “Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry” at the Department of Chemistry, Division for Metalorganics and Inorganic Materials, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Breaking the Wall of Limited Resources. What Catalysis Can Do to Save Energy and Create Materials.
Any form of energy may be transformed into another form, but the total energy always remains the same, says the law of thermodynamics – what it doesn’t tell us is how can we use this principle to our advantage. In a time of ever-decreasing natural resources, posing such a question of crucial importance for our planet – for currently, transforming energy entails threats to our environment, CO2 emissions and nuclear waste disposals being the most severe.
Matthias Driess (1961), a philosopher and a scientist by training, seeks an answer by transforming sunlight into hydrogen. After working at the universities of Heidelberg and Bochum, Driess now serves as coordinator at “Unifying Concepts in Catalysis” (UniCat) in Berlin, the largest Cluster of Excellence project funded by the German Research Foundation. If the experiments from scientists in the consortium are successful, they could contribute substantially to solve the problems inherent in world-wide energy supply: political dependency, CO2 emissions and environmental damage – thus realising what the Greek “energeia” means: activity.
