Claudia Matthäus was appointed Professor of Physiology of Nutrition (pay sclae group W1) at the Institute of Nutritional Sciences at the Faculty of Science.

Matthäus studied chemistry at Technische Universität Dresden and received her PhD in developmental biology from Freie Universität Berlin in 2015. From 2016 to 2019, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Oliver Daumke‘s group at the Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin. She then worked as a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, with Justin Taraska.

In her research, Matthäus investigates how lipids enter fat, muscle or fibroblast cells, and which processes are required for this, especially at the cell membrane. In particular, she is interested in very small invaginations at the cell membrane, also called caveolae. Using high-resolution light and electron microscopy, she is investigating the extent to which caveolae participate in lipid uptake and how these processes are regulated at the molecular level.

Sven Raum was appointed Professor for Algebra (pay scale group W2) at the Faculty of Science.

Raum studied at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität-Münster (WWU) from 2005 to 2009 and received his PhD in 2013 with a thesis on representation categories and the classification of von Neumann algebras and quantum groups. A one-year stay as a research fellow at École normale supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon) was followed by stays at Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) in Kyoto and WWU Münster as a Marie Curie Fellow. In 2016, he became an instructor at the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), from where he moved to a professorship at Stockholm University in 2018.

Raum‘s current research focus is the study of symmetries of discrete structures, mainly using methods from the mathematical disciplines of group theory and operator algebras. His work has been supported by numerous third-party grants, including the Swedish Research Council and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

Nora Kulak was appointed Professor for Inorganic Chemistry (pay scale group W3) at the Faculty of Science.

Nora Kulak studied chemistry and earned a doctorate at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in the field of bioinorganic chemistry. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM – Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung) in Berlin in the field of surface analysis and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge/MA with a focus on medicinal inorganic chemistry. In her role as Junior Professor for Bioinorganic Chemistry, she conducted research at Freie Universität Berlin from 2011 to 2020. From 2020, she held the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg. From October 2022, she was head of its Institute of Chemistry.

Nora Kulak’s main research area is coordination chemistry and its applications: New, metal-containing compounds are synthesized and characterized in the lab. Molecules are designed in a way that allows the metal to perform various biological activities, such as killing cancer cells. With her appointment to the University of Potsdam and her collaboration in a DFG Research Unit, Kulak will now also focus on conducting research into the (photo-)catalytic activity of such compounds.