Professor for Mineral Construction Materials

1.    What is your typical Tuesday like at work?

"Every day starts with me going through my diary and my emails. On Tuesdays, every two weeks, we have our working group meeting. During the lecture term, I then hold a seminar on ‘Sustainable Building’ straight afterwards. After the last seminar, there’s still plenty of time for short, impromptu meetings or to focus on larger tasks, such as papers, grant applications and the like, before I head home for dinner.”

2.    Which skills from your degree help you in your day-to-day work? 

“I need a great deal of knowledge of materials science in my day-to-day work. In our team, we are conducting research into mineral binders – more specifically, how they harden and what factors might limit their durability in concrete. As a result, I spend a lot of time looking at phase stability, transport mechanisms and reaction kinetics. As our work is mainly experimental, it’s an advantage that I learnt about many mineralogical methods during my degree, and particularly during my time as a student assistant.” 

3.    What is your favourite part of your current job?

“Definitely the academic work I do with my PhD students, particularly our research meetings. During these, we discuss together how we can interpret the results we’ve obtained, or what the next steps (further experiments, alternative analyses) should be in order to explain them.”

4.    How did you end up in your current job?

I studied Earth Sciences at undergraduate and postgraduate level at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Even whilst I was a student, I was already researching the hydration of cements and wrote both my undergraduate and postgraduate theses in this field at the Chair of Applied Mineralogy. I completed my doctoral thesis as an ‘Industrial PhD’ at NTU in Trondheim (Norway), as part of a collaborative project with Norcem, the Norwegian cement manufacturer. This was followed by a postdoc at NTNU entitled ‘EnDurCrete – Environmentally friendly and Durable Concrete’, which was an EU Horizon 2020 project involving a large number of European partners – which was brilliant for my professional network. Towards the end of my postdoc, I applied for the tenure-track professorship in ‘Mineral Construction Materials’ at TUM. In the summer of 2020, I was appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor. This summer, I will complete my tenure-track period there as scheduled after six years and will take up a permanent position as an associate professor at TUM.