Felix Kaspar

I grew up in rural southern Bavaria, Germany, and moved north to study Biotechnology at the TU Braunschweig in 2013. During that time, I completed two three-month research internships abroad, supported by the DAAD RISE program. In 2015, I visited Charles Sturt University in Albury, Australia, where I pursued a project in clinical biochemistry in Herbert Jerlinek's group. In 2016, I joined A. J. Arduengo's group at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, USA, to work on a project in preparative organometallic chemistry. That same year, I completed my BSc degree with a thesis on natural product chemistry by joining Marc Stadler's group at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany. Also in 2016, I then went on to join a master program in Biochemistry in Braunschweig. In 2017/2018, I completed a five-month research internship (partially supported by a Germany scholarship) at the University of Queensland, Australia, working on natural product chemistry in Rob Capon's group. In late 2019, I completed my MSc degree with a thesis on high-throughput method development in Peter Neubauer's group at the TU Berlin, Germany. I continued working on high-throughput experimentation, nucleoside phosphorylases and thermodynamically controlled reaction systems in that group for my PhD, which I finished in early 2021 with a cumulative thesis on analytical methods and thermodynamic frameworks for biocatalytic nucleoside synthesis. In the spring of 2021, I returned to Braunschweig as an independently funded postdoctoral fellow (DFG), mentored by Anett Schallmey, to work on biocatalytic method development, unusual enzymatic transformations and applied spectroscopy. In mid-2024, I moved to the University of Groningen as a DAAD PRIME fellow, mentored by Clemens Mayer, where I have been exploring new directions in prenyl (bio-)chemistry since then.