Dr Frederik Wurm
Frederik received his PhD in 2009 from the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany) working on nonlinear block copolymers. From 2009 to 2011 he was a postdoctoral Humboldt fellow at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) focusing on novel bioconjugation strategies. In 2012 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Germany) as a group leader in the department of Katharina Landfester. He is also junior faculty of the Max Planck Graduate Center (MPGC). He finished his habilitation in 2016 about “Polyphosphoresters and Smart Nanocarriers”. From 2016 to 2018 he was a deputy professor at the University of Ulm in Macromolecular Chemistry.
Frederik has published over 150 research articles and received several awards such as the Polymer Chemistry Lectureship, the Georg Manecke Award and the Reimund Stadler Award of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh), the European Young Chemist Award, and the Lecturer Award of the German Chemical Industry Fund.
Frederik leads the research group “Functional Polymers” and develops new degradable and molecularly adjustable polymers. He has been particularly interested in biodegradable polyesters based on phosphoric acid in recent years. He has developed new bioinspired materials to facilitate their interaction with biomaterials, e.g. in human blood. Furthermore, such polyphosphoesters are interesting as alternatives to conventional plastics, with the ecological advantage of their degradability. Additionally, his research covers areas of biopolymer modification and sequence-controlled polymerization, especially focussing on the living anionic polymerization.
