Prof. Dr. Carlo Thilgen

ETH Zurich
Laboratory of Organic Chemistry
HCI G 317
Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 10
CH-8093 Zurich
E-Mail: thilgen@org.chem.ethz.ch
Phone: +41 44 6322935
Fax: +41 44 6321109

Carlo Thilgen was born in Luxembourg City, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, in 1961. He received his diploma degree in Chemistry (Dipl.-Chem.) in 1987 and his doctoral degree (Dr. rer. nat.) in 1990 from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, working with Professor Fritz Vögtle at the Kekulé Institute of Organic Chemistry on macrocyclic hydrocarbons with rigid diarylhexatriene units. He then became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the group of Professor François Diederich with whom he moved to the ETH Zurich in 1992. His postdoctoral research consisted of the synthesis of molecular tweezers for the recognition of chiral dicarboxylic acids and of the isolation of two new fullerenes (C_2v- and D₃-symmetric C₇₈). In 1993, he became a Senior Research Associate in the group of Professor Diederich and, in 1996, a Lecturer at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the ETH Zurich. His research focuses on higher fullerenes and their chemistry, the chirality of fullerenes and fullerene derivatives, as well as the generation of nanostructured surfaces by assembly of porous molecular networks, the ordering of which is based on supramolecular synthons.