Prof Dr Karl Mayrhofer

Prof. Dr. Karl Mayrhofer, born in 1977, studied technical chemistry at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and received his doctorate in 2006 in the specialized field of fuel cell reaction catalysis. After a two-year research stay at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Ca, USA, and a post-doc stay at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, he became group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in 2010. In Düsseldorf, he headed the Electrocatalysis Research Group and worked on the fundamentals of electrochemical energy conversion and corrosion. In December 2015, Karl Mayrhofer was appointed Professor for Electrocatalysis at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Department of Chemical and Bioengineering. Since then, he has been jointly heading the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy of the Forschungszentrum Jülich as managing director. There, research is conducted on the effective use of renewable energy, particularly from photovoltaics, over electrochemical energy conversion, to chemical energy storage for buffering energy supply and demand. The research and development focus of Karl Mayrhofer is the fundamentals of (electro)catalytic conversion of electrical, electrochemistry in general, as well as corrosion of materials, which is also a central part of his contribution to the ERC Synergy grant DEMI.