Education Director
The current Education Director of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials is Prof.dr. Thomas L.C. Jansen. He was appointed by the Faculty Board, effective 2026-09-01.
Thomas la Cour Jansen received his PhD with the late professor Jaap Snijders in 2002 from the Theoretical Chemistry group at the University of Groningen. He did a post doc. with professor Shaul Mukamel, first at the University of Rochester and later at the University of California at Irvine. In 2005, Thomas la Cour Jansen returned to Groningen on a VENI fellowship to develop methods for studying peptide structure and dynamics. In 2007, he was awarded the VIDI fellowship to study two-dimensional spectroscopy of proteins. From 2010, he became a permanent staff member at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials working on Computational Spectroscopy. In 2021, he was promoted to associate professor and in 2022 he became chair of the Theory of Condensed Matter group. The group is one of the founding groups of the Berendsen Center for Multiscale Modeling and Material Design. The research of Thomas la Cour Jansen focus on unraveling structural and functional properties of natural and artificial systems using computational spectroscopy approaches in strong collaboration with experimental groups. The applications include a broad range of materials from proteins over photosynthetic antenna systems to perovskite solar cells. For this research, the group develops its own software packages, which are also made available to the research community. Appart from personal grants as mentioned above Thomas la Cour Jansen received a broad range of grants in collaboration with experimental groups including recent NWO TOP (2018) a NWO Groot (2020), and NWO Klein (2020). Thomas la Cour Jansen serves as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Chemical Physics. Since 2015, he was a member of the International Organization Committee of the Coherent MultiDimensional Spectroscopy conference series. From 2017, Thomas la Cour Jansen was the director of the top master programme in nanoscience.