Staff

Peer Kirsch (b. 1965 in Herford) studied chemistry at University of Heidelberg. After obtaining his PhD with H. A. Staab at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in 1993, he moved in 1994 as a Feodor Lynen/STA Fellow to a postdoctoral project with T. Ogawa to the RIKEN Institute in Wako, Japan. In 1995, he joined the Liquid Crystal Division of Merck KGaA in Darmstadt.

In parallel to his industrial work on fluorinated liquid crystals, he obtained in 2001 his habilitation at the University of Bremen, where he became an Adjunct Professor (“Honorarprofessor”) in 2009. After another stay in Japan (2005-2010) for Merck he moved his academic affiliation to the University of Freiburg where he was appointed Adjunct Professor (“außerplanmäßiger Professor”).

In 2021 he moved as Joint Industrial Professor (W3) for Organic Electronics to the Technical University of Darmstadt. He holds this appointment in parallel to his position at Merck.

Kirsch's research interests are broad: starting from biologically motivated physical-organic topics during his PhD thesis they moved continuously more and more into the direction of organic functional materials, such as liquid crystals for LCDs, ionic liquids, dyes, organic and molecular electronics. Major further interests as well as prerequisites for organic functional materials are fluoroorganic chemistry and the application of quantum chemistry for the design of materials.

Main focus over the past few years and main topic of his academic work is the integration of functional organic self-assembled monolayers (SAM) into semiconductor technology, as memory or as a component of neuromorphic or quantum computer architectures.