Dr. Bogdan Dereka

Bogdan Dereka was born in 1991 in Ukraine, where he received his undergraduate degree at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (BSc in Organic Chemistry, 2012). This is where he also got his Master's degree in Physical Organic Chemistry in 2013, after spending several months in Geneva in the group of Prof. Eric Vauthey working on the research project. This is how he got hooked up by the fascinating world of ultrafast laser spectroscopy, and he immediately started his PhD in the same group. During his PhD he was investigating excited-state symmetry breaking in multipolar organic molecules, and defended his PhD thesis early in 2018, for which he was awarded the European Photochemistry Association PhD Prize as the best PhD thesis in 2018-2020. He stayed briefly as a postdoc in the same group undertaking a short research stay at UZH (March, May 2018), during which he worked with Dr. Jan Helbing on transient 2D IR spectroscopy. In the fall of 2018, he went for a postdoc with Prof. Andrei Tokmakoff at the University of Chicago (SNSF Postdoc.Mobility). In his postdoctoral work, he studied battery electrolytes and strong hydrogen bonds. His work on crossover from hydrogen to chemical bonding (Science 2021, 371, 160) was recognized by C&EN magazine as one of the highlight scientific discoveries in 2021. In February 2022, Bogdan started his independent research as a group leader (SNSF Ambizione) at the University of Zürich.