Rubicon Fellowship for dr. Geert Reitsma

NWO rewarded dr. Geert Reitsma a prestigious Rubicon Grant for his proposal “Filming biomolecules in action”. With this grant he will continue his carrier at the Max Born Institute in Berlin.

Many processes of life rely on ultrafast movements of complex molecules. One example for an ultrafast movement happens right now while you are reading these lines: When retinal in our eye absorbs light, the molecular structure changes extremely fast. This change ultimately induces an electrical signal transduced to the brain with the result that we see the light. The general sequence of this process is very well understood. However, the underlying electronic and nuclear rearrangement of the molecule is not adequately understood. The ideal way to get this understanding is filming such a process. As the process is very fast, the frame rate needs to be very high to capture individual rearrangemnets. One prerequisite to obtain this frame rate is very advanced ultrafast laser technology. Dr. Reitsma will move to the MBI Berlin, which is a world leading institute in ultrafast laser physics. There he will have access to the most advanced laser systems allowing him to produce movies of biomolecules in action.

Dr. Reitsma did his PhD research in the Quantum Interactions and Structural Dynamics group at Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials. He received his PhD from the University of Groningen on Dec. 1, 2014.