Teaching

I have done my fair share of advertising to promote optimal control pulses and helping researchers use them, during my PhD as well as my postdoc. Optimal control has a reputation for being something only a numerics group can do. Most of my teaching effort goes into demonstrating that this is no longer true.

Using optimal control pulses on your own spectrometer

The most common question I get after a talk is some version of “this is nice, but could I actually run it here?” The answer is usually yes, and it does not require becoming an optimal control researcher. Three practical routes, in increasing order of effort:

  • Use a published pulse directly. The pulse shapes from the 1.2 GHz work are distributed with the papers. For many experiments this is a drop-in replacement for the shaped pulse you are already using.
  • Re-optimize for your hardware. Probe limits and B1 profiles differ between instruments. Pulsar.jl lets you re-run the optimization with your own constraints — the documentation has a quickstart that goes end to end.
  • Design for an experiment that does not exist yet. This is the interesting case, and the one I am always happy to talk through. Get in touch.

University teaching

NMR für Strukturchemie und Strukturbiologie I

WS 2022/23

Tutor · Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

NMR für Strukturchemie und Strukturbiologie II

SS 2022

Tutor · Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

NMR für Strukturchemie und Strukturbiologie I

WS 2021/22

Tutor · Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Principles and Applications of NMR Spectroscopy

2020

Teaching Assistant · NPTEL open online course, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

A national open-access course, so the audience was substantially larger and more varied than a lecture hall — good training in explaining spin physics without assuming the listener shares your background.

Mentoring

I have supervised four master's students through their thesis projects. I also trained students on the high-power 19F probe at MPI-NAT after its installation, and for three years ran the distribution of magnet time among lab members — which is, in practice, a teaching job as much as an administrative one.

Invited talks

  • 2024FGNMR, Rostock — “Optimal control pulses for the 1.2 GHz (28.2 T) NMR spectrometers.” Ernst Award lecture.
  • 2023NAN Seminar, UW Madison (remote) — “Low power optimal control pulses improve the performance of multidimensional biomolecular solution NMR experiments at ultrahigh field.”

Conference presentations

Oral: IMPRS Infinity 2024 (Göttingen) · EUROMAR 2024 (Bilbao) · ENC 2024 (Asilomar) · EMBO Course 2023 (Berhampur) · GRS 2023 (Vermont) · ENC 2023 (Asilomar) · IMPRS Infinity 2022 (Göttingen) · FGNMR 2022 (Karlsruhe) · 26th NMRS 2020 (Rajkot)

Poster: ICMRBS 2024 (Seoul) · EUROMAR 2022 (Utrecht) · 12th International Conference “NMR: a tool for biology” (Paris)

Service to the community

  • 2025–Reviewer, Science Advances
  • 2023–2025Co-organizer, AMPERE Café, MPI-NAT Göttingen