Professor to receive Göran Gustafsson Prize in Chemistry

The prize is one of the most prestigious to be awarded to young researchers. This year’s five recipients from Umeå, Lund, Uppsala, Gothenburg and Stockholm will share a total prize fund of SEK 33 million.

“There are many talented chemists in Sweden, so this is an honourable confirmation for my research team and me,” says Westenhoff.

He works on imaging chemical reactions. Countless such reactions take place simultaneously, converting one or more substances into new substances. These transformations are often controlled by proteins that perform a specific task.

To study this at the molecular level, he uses advanced laser and X-ray technology. This makes it possible to “film” how the structure of proteins and molecules changes when they react with each other.

Photosynthesis and solar cells

In the future, he hopes to study the role of proteins in charge transfer more closely. This is particularly important in photosynthesis, where specific proteins convert the energy of sunlight into electrons which then transport them to specific locations for further use. In the future, detailed knowledge of how this works may also be useful for the development of solar cells.

“When sunlight hits the solar cell, the energy is split into two different charges in a similar way to photosynthesis. Nature has a truly optimal process in which very little energy is lost. “We humans have not yet managed to build such effective solar cells and can certainly learn from how photosynthesis works in plants,” he notes.

Åsa Malmberg