Welcome to the Website of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network CATALOOP
- closing the loop in stereoselective catalysis with data-driven approaches
The network is funded by the European Commission through the Horizon Europe funding scheme.
Research and Training Goals of CATALOOP
The CATALOOP network aims at the development of powerful and readily applicable workflows for data-driven development of stereoselective catalysis.
As a main training goal we want to educate researchers in comprehensive data-driven experimental approaches for realizing challenging asymmetric catalytic methods.
This network brings together academic research groups with expertise in experimental catalyst development with theoretical groups skilled in computational and data-driven chemistry in order todevelop new catalytic asymmetric reactions. World-leading industrial partners with a wide range ofinterests will provide advice on which approaches may have the most impact on industry and will host the students in secondments. Students will be assigned experimental and theoretical supervisors and be trained to a minimum level of proficiency in both aspects. This envisaged combination of research and training will develop researchers with a unique skill set who are well suited to developing new enantioselective catalytic processes that are in high demand in academia and industry.
The network program will start in October 2025 and will offer 13 positions for PhD students at ten different universities and research institutes all over Europe. Please see below for a list of participating research groups
More information on research opportunities and application processes will follow soon on this website. Make sure to check back! Potential candidates please note that for applications as PhD students in the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie program funded by the European Commission there is a strict mobility regulation: In general you must not have resided in the country of the PhD placement for longer than 12 months prior to the start of the network program in October 2025. Please see here for more details.
Why data-driven catalysis?
Catalysis is a key concept for the transformation of the chemical industry towards sustainable production. One of the most challenging types of catalytic reactions to develop are stereoselective processes – the controlled preferential generation of one stereoisomer of a product over another.
The “classical" experimental development of catalytic asymmetric methods is generally difficult and time-consuming. Typically, a family of catalysts is explored based on a preliminary hypothesis. After initial (ideally positive) experimental results, further research is guided by trial and error or “educated guessing” with the goal to derive trends. One crucial shortcoming of this approach is the focus on positive results.
Data-driven approaches are attractive alternatives to the commonly used approaches to developing catalytic reactions: Descriptors are used to characterize the molecular properties of catalysts and statistical methods are then employed to derive predictive models for selective catalysis. In a data-driven approach, an initial set of reactions (including the negative results) is analysed and then used to establish such a model. Based on this, a new set of catalysts can then be predicted and tested. Subsequently, the new data is fed back into the model to improve its prediction capabilities in an evolutionary approach. Data-driven approaches therefore offer a highly structured and thus reproducible approach for the development of selective catalysts.
List of participating groups in CATALOOP
Prof. Anat Milo, Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev, Israel (link to group website)
Prof. Johannes Teichert, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany (link to group website) (spokesperson of CATALOOP)
Prof. Patrick Guiry, University College Dublin, Ireland (link to group website)
Prof. Clément Mazet, University of Geneva, Switzerland (link to group website)
Prof. Robert Pollice, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands (link to group website)
Prof. Mariola Tortosa, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain (link to group website)
Prof. Fernanda Duarte, University of Oxford, England (link to group website)
Prof. Stephen Fletcher, University of Oxford, England (link to group website)
Prof. Martín Fañanás-Mastral, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (link to group website)
Prof. Ilan Marek, Technion, Israel (link to group website)
Prof. Ivana Fleischer, University of Tübingen, Germany (link to group website)
List of industrial partners in CATALOOP
