Rate My Professor Reinhard Maurer

Reinhard J. Maurer is Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. and Professor of Computational Materials Discovery in the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna, appointed on September 1, 2025. He holds a Diploma in Chemistry with a focus on Computational Chemistry from the University of Graz (2005-2010) and a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from the Technical University of Munich (2010-2014). His career includes a postdoctoral position as Research Associate in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University (2014-2017), followed by appointments at the University of Warwick: Assistant Professor of Computational Chemistry (2017-2020), Associate Professor (2020-2022), and Professor of Computational Chemistry and Computational Physics in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics (2022-2025). Currently, he also serves as Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Göttingen and Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. Maurer is an elected member of the RSC Faraday Community Board, a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a member of the German Physical Society.

Maurer's research centers on the structure, chemical reactivity, and energy conversion processes at materials surfaces and interfaces, with applications in renewable technologies such as batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells. He develops and employs simulations combining quantum mechanical predictions with artificial intelligence algorithms, focusing on ultrafast dynamics at surfaces and interfaces, hybrid organic-inorganic interfaces, electronic structure theory, machine learning for many-electron systems, and property-driven inverse design of novel molecules and materials. Key publications include 'Unifying machine learning and quantum chemistry with a deep neural network for molecular wavefunctions' (Nature Communications, 2019), 'High-throughput property-driven generative design of functional organic molecules' (Nature Computational Science, 2023), 'Role of Tensorial Electronic Friction in Energy Transfer at Metal Surfaces' (Physical Review Letters, 2016), 'Vibrational Energy Dissipation in Noncontact Single-Molecule Junctions Governed by Local Geometry and Electronic Structure' (JACS Au, 2025), and 'Structure of Graphene Grown on Cu(111): X-Ray Standing Wave Measurement and Density Functional Theory Prediction' (Physical Review Letters, 2024). His work advances theoretical and computational methods in surface science, photocatalysis, nanotechnology, and electrochemistry.