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Making Molecules Move Matter: Strategies towards molecular driven soft robotics

Nature has been converting molecular motion into macroscopic work for billions of years, from bacterial flagella to complex muscle tissues. By comparison, artificial molecular systems are still in their infancy, dating back barely twenty years. To bridge the gap toward functional soft robotics, several hurdles remain. Here, we present two distinct approaches from our lab, operating at different hierarchical levels.

1. At the molecular level, we have developed photoswitches which, due to their extended π-system, enable new applications in the fabrication of photoresponsive, liquid-crystalline polymers.
2. With light-controlled levitation, we present a completely new system for the controlled, non-contact movement of macroscopic objects in space.

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Biography

Current positions:

• Senior professor at Kiel University (Germany), 
• Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB), and 
• Visiting Professor Fellow at the UNSW.

Strong ties to Australia:

• Wilsmore Fellowship, University of Melbourne 2005
• Visiting Professor at ANU Canberra in 2012
• Visiting Professorship at UNSW Sydney 2025

Research Interests:

• Synthetic chemistry 
• Molecular spintronics
• Computational and quantum chemistry 
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning 

Founder of two startup companies:

• 2020 Herges-Detection (trace detection of explosives)
• 2023 QuantView (hyperpolarized MRI)

More details: 

http://scholle.oc.uni-kiel.de/herges/pages_en/herges.html