Known for his outstanding contributions to the areas of charge-separation in donor-acceptor materials and construction of nanostructured thin film for solar energy conversion, Dirk Guild has been the recipient of many honors in his career. Some of those awards including: VCI Abschlussstipendium (VCI, 1990), Heisenberg Preis (DFG, 1999), Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize (Swiss Society of Photochemistry, 2000), JSPS Award (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 2003), JPP Award (Society of Porphyrins & Phthalocyanines, 2004), and Elhuyar-Goldschmidt Award (Spanish Chemical Society, 2009).
His scientific career began at the University of Köln, from where he graduated in Chemistry (1988) and from where he received his PhD (1990). After a postdoctoral stay at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg/USA (1991/1992), he took a position at the Hahn-Meitner-Institute Berlin (1992-1994). Following a brief stay as a Feodor-Lynen Fellow at Syracuse University/USA he joined the faculty of the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory/USA (1995). Then, after nearly a decade in the USA, the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg succeeded in attracting Dirk M. Guldi back to Germany, despite major efforts by the University of Notre Dame (2004), who offered him a position as Director of the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory & Full Professor in the Physics Department, and the University of Bowling Green (2005) as Ohio Board of Regents Eminent Scholar in Photochemical Sciences.
As a member of The Electrochemical Society, he served as Chair of the Fullerenes, Nanotubes, and Carbon Nanostructures Division between 2008 and 2012.
Listen to Guldi in “A Word About Nanocarbons.”
