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Dr. Guanqi Qiu wins ERC Starting Grant
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Dr. Guanqi Qiu, research group leader at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, a prestigious Starting Grant worth €1.5 million over five years for her project IntrinsicR. Rather than creating new tools or materials, the project offers a new way of thinking about chemical reactivity, treating reactivity and selectivity not as a molecule-specific outcome, but as a consequence emerging from system-level dynamics. Reactivity describes the ability of a substance to undergo a reaction, while selectivity determines which product a reaction will favor when several are possible.
Kinetic–thermodynamic responsiveness: more than passive observation
IntrinsicR focuses on the intrinsic reactivity of reactions, particularly their kinetic- thermodynamic responsiveness. It measures how sensitively a reaction’s rate changes when the difference in energy between reactants and products is altered and is usually treated as a fixed property. Qiu and her team challenge this traditional view by treating responsiveness as something that can be deliberately tuned: “Each family of reactions has its own geometric and electronic buffering, encoded in its kinetic–thermodynamic responsiveness. This responsiveness carries distinct mechanistic meaning. We aim to understand, modulate, and leverage the responsiveness both as a diagnostic for mechanistic regimes and as a design element to tune selectivity. Our new conceptual framework understands reactions at a system level and extracts chemical insight from systematic differences across families of reactions,” explains Qiu. “Much of chemical innovation focuses on building new tools, such as new techniques or new catalyst structures. We take a different angle: rather than making a hammer, we present a new way of understanding what a hammer even does. For the broader chemistry community, we aim to offer a deductive counterbalance to the reactions-specific projects and a causal counterbalance to data-science approaches.”
Extracting deeper chemical insights from standard techniques by reshaping how we ask questions
Qiu's group demonstrates that by reframing how we interpret reactivity, from isolated rate constants to system-level responsiveness, we can extract far more mechanistic insight from standard experimental and computational tools. Rather than asking “which reaction is more selective?” the team asks “which selectivity is more tunable?” Their ambition lies not in technical novelty, but in revealing new layers of meaning from what we already know how to measure. On the applied side, the team aims to demonstrate how selectivity can be rationally manipulated, moving beyond trial and error.
Guanqi Qiu earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Cambridge (UK) and her PhD from Princeton University (USA). After two years as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, she established her independent research group “Fundamental Principles of Organic Reactivity“ at the Kohlenforschung in 2023.
The European Research Council, funded by the European Union, is one of the most prestigious international funding bodies. Its Starting Grant supports outstanding early-career scientists with exceptional potential to establish independent research groups. At the institute, this grant will enable Qiu to recruit scientists and build the team needed to tackle this ambitious project.
Dr. Guanqi Qiu
gqiu@kofo.mpg.de
+49 208 3062137
https://www.kofo.mpg.de/970824/qiu
Dr. Guanqi Qiu receives a 1.5 million euro ERC Starting Grant for her project IntrinsicR, rethinking ...
Copyright: Bitter/Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung
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Dr. Guanqi Qiu receives a 1.5 million euro ERC Starting Grant for her project IntrinsicR, rethinking ...
Copyright: Bitter/Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung
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