Dominik Bäuerle a PhD student under Dr. Elisabet Romero and Prof. Pau Ballester’s supervision has succesfully defended his thesis entitled “Towards photosynthetic studies with user-friendly two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy” publicly on Wednesday 28 January 2026.
The members of the evaluation committee have been Prof. Tom Oliver (University of Bristol, United Kingdom), Dr. Luca Bolzonello (ICFO, Spain) and Dr. Parveen Akhtar (HUN-REN Biological Research Centre, Hungary).
First, we will know more about yourself: where are you from, where and what you studied, your hobbies, and any other information you would like to include.
I was born and raised in the Breisgau, a German region located in the Rhine Valley close to France and Switzerland. After obtaining my undergraduate degree in Physics in my hometown of Freiburg, I specialised in renewable energy science in Amsterdam, which eventually led me to study photosynthesis. Learning languages, playing the piano and endless podcast listening are among the hobbies that I spent most of my time on so far.
Have you received any special external funding? If so, which one?
Thankfully I was granted a Severo Ochoa fellowship for my PhD at ICIQ, especially since it has a decent amount of money assigned for secondments that can be chosen flexibly and imposes a certain structure on the research goals right from the start. I encourage anyone to apply if possible!
Why did you become a scientist?
Science class in school was the only one for which I didn’t mind doing homework – that felt like a strong hint for someone who wanted to put in as little effort as possible! Even though I didn’t have the enthusiasm or brilliance of some other kids, I always felt at home among other scientists, and that’s the ultimate proof it was the right call.
What do you want to achieve as a scientist?
I want to be someone that effectively collaborates with people and tries to do produce clean data, while I try to avoid falling victim to my cognitive biases and waste other people’s hard-earned taxes by doing bad laboratory work. These things alone are already quite hard to achieve, but I’d like to get there.
What is your thesis about?
It is about making it easier to use a spectroscopic technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES). In 2DES, one uses several short pulses of visible laser light to excite molecules and track processes that follow excitation. This can be useful for any type of molecule absorbing the visible with dynamics on timescales slower than about 100 femtoseconds, for example when studying the chromophore-protein complexes that are responsible for running the first energy conversions following light absorption in photosynthetic organisms.
From the lessons learnt at ICIQ, which one do you value the most?
I learned that what really matters is whether I gave it my best. If you focus on your work it will give results eventually. Complaining about things I can’t change, which I did more than I should have, gets you nowhere. I hope I’ll internalize this forever!
What will you miss the most from ICIQ?
Luckily nothing, since I will continue as postdoc.
What advice do you have for someone who’s starting their PhD now?
Asking questions is always a good thing, but only once you gave your mind the opportunity to tackle the question without help for a day or so. Furthermore, calmly taking time to read things will not be a problem for your experimental success, because every minute of reading invested will save hours in the lab, help grow your horizon and deepen your insight. It is, however, important to move back and forth between experiment and literature regularly to first face the practical issues and then search for answers and new ideas in publications.
Have you ever been emotional over an experiment? Why?
I’ve been emotional about my experiment most of the time, usually because something didn’t let the measurement achieve the quality I decided I need. But every time something goes wrong, it’s a unique opportunity to finally figure out what to do better and which questions to ask, so being emotional is a good thing as long as it merely means you care about the science and it doesn’t affect relationships with colleagues in a negative way.
Science is fun because…
The best part of science for me is that I meet people from many different cultures. As scientists we share a common basis in our work, but hearing stories about other places and customs across the globe is a lot of fun and feels so enriching.
If you were a piece of lab equipment, what would you be?
The entire 2DES setup in PB8 – I feel I know more details about it than can be considered reasonable/sane.
La entrada Glückwunsch Dr. Bäuerle! se publicó primero en ICIQ.