Dr. Eric Hill

18 September 2020, by Ingeborg Adler

Photo: CUI

On 1.8.2020 Dr. Eric Hill started as Young Investigator Group Leader in the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter”. Dr. Hill studied chemistry at Southern Oregon University and received his doctorate in Nanoscience at the University of New Mexico, followed by a Juan de la Cierva Postdoc in the Liz-Marzán group at CIC-biomaGUNE in San Sebastian, Spain, and a brief Postdoc at UT Austin. Most recently, he established his own research group at the Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH) with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A jury of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) had selected him as one of 13 internationally renowned researchers as project leader in Germany for the German-French program "Make Our Planet Great Again". The program is scheduled to run for a total of five years and aims to strengthen research on climate change. Dr. Hill has also recently received an individual grant from the DFG to study the hierarchical ordering of anisotropic nanomaterials at the interface of bubbles formed by laser-directed plasmonic heating.

This research group is now continuing its work at the Universität Hamburg. Dr. Hill's area of expertise is colloidal synthesis and self-assembly toward applications in renewable energy. His aim is to understand how to control the nanostructure of materials to carry out photocatalysis more efficiently than is currently the case. These nanomaterials will be studied by a variety of ultrafast techniques, in order to understand the processes which enable their enhanced efficiency at the atomic level. Hill’s group will conduct research at the Institute of Physical Chemistry; his hosts are Prof. Alf Mews from the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Prof. Michael Fröba from the Institute of Inorganic and Applied Chemistry.