05 March 2021 / People

Murielle Delley appointed as Assistant Professor

The chemist Murielle Delley researches the fundamentals and mode of action of catalysts. Now the President’s Board of the University of Basel has appointed her as a new Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

Professor Murielle Delley has been a research group leader at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Basel since 2020. She studied chemistry at ETH Zurich, where she received her PhD in 2017. In her dissertation, she deepened our understanding of how certain catalysts, such as those used in polyethylene production, work. For her findings, the Swiss Academy of Sciences awarded her the Prix Schläfli in Chemistry in 2019.

She then conducted postdoctoral research at Yale University in New Haven (USA) before being awarded both a PRIMA grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation and a Branco Weiss Fellowship in 2020. Both funding programs enabled the researcher to implement her own projects in the field of surface chemistry and catalysis for five years – now as an assistant professor of chemistry (without tenure track) at the Faculty of Science of the University of Basel.

Through her research, Delley is working towards more sustainable chemical technologies by developing abundant materials as catalysts in chemical transformations and by exploring new controls on catalysis.