Dr. Bernd Grohe - Studies and Development
After the studies of Technical Mineralogy (1992-1996) at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, I completed my diploma thesis in 1996 with Prof. W. F. Müller (TU - Darmstadt, Germany) working on “Decomposition kinetics of iron-free synthetic clinopyroxene”.
For my Ph.D. I joined the group of Prof. G. Wegner at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz, Germany (Prof. Wegner is currently Scientific Director at the “Institute for Microtechniques Mainz”), and worked on the “Synthesis of ceramic barium titanate nanoparticles in the presence of organic additives”. In 1999 I received my Ph.D. at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz.
It followed a short period of investigations on the heat transfer in organic/inorganic composite materials as a project manager with Prof. T. Stumm at University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Germany (in co-operation with the companies AgroSys and Agrar Service and the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany).
In 2001 I returned to the MPI-P and joined the group of Prof. W. Knoll (currently Scientific Managing Director, Austrian Research Centers, Austria) as a research associate. Together with Dipl.-Ing. B. Menges and Dr. M. Kreiter I worked on the design and preparation techniques for assemblies of metal-organic hybrid nanostructures and investigated their optical properties. These studies still provide a fundamental basis for the work of Master and Ph.D. students.
Since 2003, I have been working with Prof. G. K. Hunter and Prof. H. A. Goldberg in the CIHR Group in Skeletal Development and Remodeling and The Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at The University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Here, I concentrate my investigations on the peptide and protein affected precipitation of kidney stone-related calcium oxalate hydrates and on protein and collagen mediated nucleation and growth of hydroxyapatite, the main inorganic component of bone and teeth.
