Prof. Dr. Máté Bezdek

Born in November 1991, Máté grew up partly in Budapest (Hungary) and Calgary (Canada). He earned his B.Sc. (Hons.) in Chemistry from the University of Calgary in 2014, where he worked with Profs. Curtis Berlinguette and Warren Piers on the syntheses of ruthenium dye complexes for dye-sensitized solar cells and perfluorinated aryl boranes, respectively. Máté then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University with Prof. Paul Chirik. Máté’s graduate work explored proton-coupled electron transfer in molybdenum complexes relevant to the interconversion of ammonia with its elements as well as its application to organometallic chemistry. For his dissertation, Máté was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton’s top honor for PhD students. After receiving his PhD in June 2019, Máté joined Prof. Timothy Swager’s group at MIT. There, he utilized concepts in molecular aerobic oxidation catalysis to develop gas sensors for the detection of environmental pollutants such as methane and hydrogen sulfide. Following his postdoctoral appointment, Máté joined ETH Zürich as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Chemistry in August 2021, where his research group’s interests span organometallic chemistry, carbon nanomaterial-metal hybrids and stimuli-responsive materials.