Dr. Johannes Hunger
Johannes Hunger studied chemistry at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he obtained his degree in 2006 and obtained his PhD in the group of Richard Buchner. In 2010, he was granted a postdoctoral fellowship by the German Science Foundation (DFG), which allowed him to spend two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the FOM Institute AMOLF (Amsterdam, Netherlands) with Huib Bakker and Mischa Bonn. In 2012 he joined the MPI-P as a group leader. In 2016 he established his distinguished research group at the MPI-P with a starting grant from the European research council (ERC).
Main Research Interests
The research in his group is centred around dynamics in the condensed phase with a focus on Coulombic and hydrogen-bonding interactions. The group intensively studies room temperature ionic liquids, electrolyte solutions, and solvation phenomena. In these studies, we elucidate fundamental properties of liquids (e.g. molecular-level ion transport, molecular association,..), but also the relevance of such interactions in biology (e.g. osmolyte action, specific ion effects…) or technology (e.g. solvation dynamics, dissolution phenomena,…). With funding from the ERC, the efforts in elucidating the role of non-covalent interactions within reactive intermediates in organo-catalysis are intensified and became a major focus of the ‘liquid dynamics’ group.