Florian Mulks

What an honour! I just got wind that I received the award of the Dr. Otto Röhm Gedächtnisstiftung for outstanding young chemists. Thanks so much to the group for your hard work and congratulations to the other awardees!

And thanks to everyone for attending the lecture and the interesting discussions!

Thanks for meeting and inviting me, Dr. Daniel Janßen-Müller and Profs. Johannes Walker, Manuel Alcarazo, Sven Schneider, and Konrad Koszinowsk! And thanks to everyone for attending the lecture and the interesting discussions! The post is delayed a bit due to technical issues.

I had the great honour to give a talk on our work on carbodications in Göttingen! What a prestigious place with lots of exciting chemistry going on. I loved the connections between organic, physical, and inorganic chemistry.

We are looking forward to working with this new shiny metal labmate! #glovebox #chemistry #cations

The hunt is on, but the tools are lacking: exciting main group dications were recently isolated and more will come. Yoshio explored in our preprint hot off the press the use of oxide ion affinities to measure double Lewis acidity of dications!
Preprint on ChemRxiv: doi.org/10.26434/che...

Thanks so much for the invitation and organization! It was great hearing of the exciting chemistry going on at University of Freiburg in the labs of Werz, Breit, Jessen, Pappas, and yours. It was also a special honour to have Reinhard Brückner in the auditorium.

Great to have Florian Mulks @ffmulks.bsky.social from RWTH Aachen @rwth.bsky.social at our colloquium yesterday! His talk on dicarbocations was truly positive 😁. Thanks for the inspiring science and the lovely dinner afterwards! @werzlab.bsky.social

I taught the first lecture of chemistry to our new class of medicine students at @rwth.bsky.social yesterday! What an exhilarating feeling to teach such a large group of bright people whose interests extend well beyond the scope of their future profession. Good luck with your studies!

Check this fantastic chance out if you are looking for a postdoc!

Join our MSCA Masterclass (May 4 to 8, 2026) in Aachen and refine your MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal 💯 All travel and accommodation costs are fully covered by RWTH, the application deadline is November 30, 2025. 📅

➡️ www.rwth-aachen.de/go/id/bqedgo...

📸: Martin Braun

Selected candidates get a fully funded trip to Aachen (May 2026) for intensive application coaching. We'll build your MSCA-PF 2026 application together!

My projects are open in advanced synthesis and sustainable catalysis—or bring YOUR idea! Other faculties have great projects too.

Postdoc Dreamers! Aiming for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at a top European institution?

Join the RWTH Aachen MSCA Masterclass 2026!

🔗 Details & Apply: www.rwth-aachen.de/cms/root/for...

#MSCA #Postdoc #Research #RWTH #Science #AcademicSky #EUFunding #Chemistry #Catalysis

Diiminium Nucleophile Adducts Are Stable and Convenient Strong Lewis Acids** Diiminium nucleophile adducts, convenient Lewis acids that satisfy some measures for superacidity, have been synthesised by coordination with stabilising pyridine donors. Even in their abstraction of...

Oh, how nice! Our inaugural (very cool) work on carbodications has garnered enough citations to be the first fully independent paper earning an h-index point for me!
chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Bond Dissociation Energies, Proton, Hydride, Electron Affinities, and Ionization Potentials of C1 Hydrocarbon Ions Carbon and hydrocarbons are fundamental building blocks of life. Here, we present a comprehensive computational study on the stability and reactivity of CHx±n (X = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4) species across charge states n ranging from −4 to +4 and multiplicities from singlet to quintet. We benchmark suitable methods and select CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVQZ for computing the bond dissociation energies (BDEs), proton affinities (PAs), hydride affinities (HAs), electron affinities (EAs), and ionization potentials (IPs). We discuss observed trends in charge-dependent stability and reactivity, with implications for a fundamental understanding of carbon–hydrogen species. We believe that these data will be useful for further investigations of highly reactive hydrocarbons in unusual electronic states.

We noticed a surprising lack of data on absolutely fundamental C1 molecules. We computed a useful collection of thermodynamic data (BDE, EA, IP, HA) at the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVQZ level of theory to fill this gap.

Early view at J. Phys. Chem. A: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

This model also reproduces experimental electrophilicity and nucleophilicity scales for 21 electrophiles and 20 nucleophiles, with R2 correlations of 0.98 and 0.94, respectively.

In this model, the electrophile–nucleophile interaction energy is modeled by perturbations in the chemical and external potentials of the isolated species. The GC-GPRI accurately identifies the most reactive hard and soft atoms in complex molecules with multiple reactive sites.

The GC-GPRI is derived within the zero-temperature grand canonical ensemble conceptual density-functional theory (CDFT) framework using a perturbative approach.

Abstract: The Grand Canonical General-Purpose Reactivity Indicator (GC-GPRI) is introduced as a tool for predicting reactivity and for discerning the relative electrophilicity and nucleophilicity of electrophiles and nucleophiles, respectively.

Thanks to my postdoc Yoshio Barrera for setting this colab up with his home institution. This was one of his last PhD projects with some of the great minds of conceptual density functional theory, Prof. James Anderson and Prof. Paul Ayers.

Check out our recent adventure in making simple tools for rationalizing broad chemical reactivity. The math may look a bit scary but the application is as straightforward as it gets with any standard DFT tools.

Now in early view: lnkd.in/eEnzKvuQ

Corrrection to “1,4‐Dearomatization of Pyridines and Quinolines Enabled by the Carbodication Lewis Acid” Click on the article title to read more.

Our work was the core foundation for some exciting application studies — reductions of carbodications with hydride donors! — which sadly slipped past the peer-review @angewandtechemie.bsky.social .

Thanks for the collaboration by the authors in fixing this. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

π‐Electron Donation at the Sulfoximidoyl Nitrogen Atom Knowledge of the physicochemical properties and the reactivity of functional groups is invaluable in organic chemistry. While substantial understanding of properties/reactivities exists for standard ...

Just accepted: Benjamin's deep dive into the "π-Electron Donation at the Sulfoximidoyl Nitrogen Atom". Pre-editing version: doi.org/10.1002/anie... Happy to contribute to this mechanistic study in a collaboration with Carsten Bolm.

Our minireview on trityl cation applications hot off the press @synthesis1969.bsky.social
— carbocations are just getting started! Check it out at:
doi.org/10.1055/a-25...

Check out Yoshio's preview article "Strained diradicaloids for σ-bond-insertion reactions: A breakthrough in drug discovery" in Chem @CellCellPress authors.elsevier.com/a/1knqg8jWHE...

We highlight Houk and Garg's exciting paper in print at Nature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out Yoshio's preview article "Strained diradicaloids for σ-bond-insertion reactions: A breakthrough in drug discovery" in Chem @CellCellPress authors.elsevier.com/a/1knqg8jWHE...

We highlight Houk and Garg's exciting paper in print at Nature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you for the invitation to the special collection on modern Lewis acid chemistry, @riedellab.bsky.social @grebgroup.bsky.social and Meeta!

Thank you to EurJIC for the invitation to the EurJIC Talents collection!

One‐Step Synthesis of Donor‐Substituted Symmetric and Unsymmetric Trityl Cations from Arenes and Benzoic Acids In this study, we report that reacting electron-rich arenes and benzoic acids with trifluoromethanesulfonic anhydride gives convenient one-step and one-pot access to triphenylmethylium trifluorometha...

Congratulations to Yanick @thetimebreaker.bsky.social on the discovery of a direct access to "electron-rich" triphenylcarbenium triflates via a Friedel Crafts cascade from carboxylic acids and arenes. The paper was just accepted in EurJIC:
chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Recent Applications of Triphenylmethyl (Trityl) Cations in Synthesis Thieme E-Books & E-Journals

Organic Lewis acids are picking up traction!
Check out Yiwei's update short review
Recent Applications of Triphenylmethyl (Trityl) Cations in Synthesis
doi.org/10.1055/a-25...

News | mulksgrp mulksgrp at RWTH Aachen

New year, new group website:
mulksgrp.ac/post/website...

Check it out. Thanks to our student assistant for the excellent work.

We mainly improve its functionality to make it a more active space for sharing ideas and useful tutorials. See you there!