Thomas Baumgartner
Biographical Abstract
Thomas Baumgartner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry with an excellent track record in both fundamental main group chemistry as well as inorganic/organometallic polymer chemistry obtained while working in the groups of two international leaders in their respective fields.
During the studies towards his PhD (1996-1998), he investigated low coordinated phosphorus compounds in the group of Prof. Edgar Niecke at the University of Bonn, Germany. In 1999, he moved to Canada as a DFG-postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto where he investigated transition metal-containing polymers with Prof. Ian Manners. In 2002 he was awarded a prestigious Liebig-Fellowship by the German Chemical Industry Association that allowed him to start his career as independent researcher. Baumgartner was able to establish a vigorous and highly successful research program on organophosphorus electronic materials that has resulted in 21 publications (3 invited review articles) as primary author in high impact peer-reviewed journals to date.
He is an internationally recognized leader in organophosphorus materials for organic electronics; he serves as a referee for granting agencies as well as peer-reviewed journals. He has also been invited to participate in several international conferences and to give lectures at international chemistry departments. Baumgartner currently leads a group of five graduate students (2 PhD, 3 M.Sc.), four PDFs (three of them jointly supervised with other researchers), and four research assistants (undergraduate and graduate), but his alumni already include one PhD and two M.Sc. graduates as well as 16 undergraduate students and two graduate visiting research assistants that have worked in his group over the past seven years. Since arriving in Calgary in July 2006, he was able to secure significant funding through CFI, NSERC, Alberta Ingenuity, as well as ISEEE and CSEE.
Research Abstract
Dr. Baumgartner’s research group is interested in the synthesis and advanced characterization of phosphaorganic and organometallic pi-conjugated materials, for alternative energy applications. This field of research is multidisciplinary, uniting organic, inorganic as well as polymeric objectives and techniques. It can be placed within materials science, as the development of 'smart materials' is a major goal.
In the past few years, this group was able to establish a new building block for organic electronics. The dithieno[3,2-b:2’,3’-d]phosphole scaffold exhibits exceptionally valuable optoelectronic properties including unprecedented fluorescence efficiencies and can be utilized within molecular, but also polymeric materials. These features are of interest for applications such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), organic field-effect transistors (OFET), or organic photovoltaic cells (OPV). The chemical nature of the phosphorus center in this system also allows for an efficient way to modify the properties by synthetically facile procedures to accommodate the function for certain applications that are not possible in this simplicity with genuine organic materials.
Over the years, this group has performed fundamental structure-property studies on this new building block and has subsequently tailored the materials’ properties towards specific applications. These contributions have addressed processability by incorporating the unit in polymeric scaffolds for OLED or OPV applications, emission color for application in OLEDs, as well as solid state organization and n-type semiconducting behaviour for application in OFETs. In the context of these studies we were also able to discover a valuable sensory material that is highly selective for fluoride ions. Studies to date have established organophosphorus materials in the field of organic electronics, introducing novel features and significant benefits that have motivated other international researchers to further develop this budding area of main group element based organic electronics.