"Matter does not matter, morphology is everything."

Heiner Friedrich works at the interface of materials chemistry and soft matter science. He focusses on the fundamental aspects of chemical and physical processes relevant to the multiscale structuring of materials. The aim hereby is to create and improve functionality by (multiscale) morphology optimization and to provide sustainable solutions based on abundant or renewable building blocks. Materials examples include porous silica with tunable mass-transport properties for energy storage, separation, and catalysis applications; and graphene composites with tunable energy-transport properties for printed electronics and heat transport/storage applications. To create such functional materials with truly multiscale morphologies he combines bottom-up self-organization and top-down (additive) manufacturing approaches. To gain insight into morphology evolution during formation, operation, degradation and, prospectively, recycling of the material he utilizes quantitative microscopy (QM). To advance QM his team develops cryo, in-situ & 3D electron microscopy approaches for the dynamic investigation of materials over multiple length and time scales.

Heiner Friedrich is a physical chemist with a passion for assembling and imaging complex functional structures. He received his master’s degree in physics in 2001 from TU Dresden (GER) with a specialization in particle and wave optics. From 2002 to 2005 he worked at Arizona State University (USA) developing electron tomography for materials science. He then moved to Utrecht University (NL) where in 2009 he obtained his PhD (cum laude) in the fields of inorganic chemistry, catalysis, and quantitative electron microscopy. In 2009 he started part-time as a junior assistant professor at Utrecht University and as a postdoctoral researcher at TU Eindhoven, where he was appointed as full-time assistant professor in 2011. He has been leading since 2018 the Center for Multiscale Electron Microscopy and since 2019 he has been working as a scientific staff member at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry. He acts as the TU/e executive board member of the Dutch Electron Microscopy Infrastructure (NEMI). His research focusses on multiscale structuring of materials combining bottom-up and top-down assembly methods.