Marc Koper (1967) studied chemistry at Utrecht University, and obtained his PhD (cum laude) with Prof. J.H.Sluyters from Utrecht University in 1994 on “Far-from-equilibrium phenomena in electrochemical systems: instabilities, oscillations and chaos”. From 1995 to 1997 he was a postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow in the group of Prof. W.Schmickler at the University of Ulm (Germany). In 1997, he returned to the Netherlands to join the group of Prof. R.A. van Santen at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he initially was a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and later associate professor. In 2005, he was appointed full professor in fundamental surface science at Leiden University. His interests are in electrochemistry, electrocatalysis, (electrochemical) surface science, and theoretical and computational (electro-)chemistry.

Research themes in the Koper group 

The Koper group studies fundamental aspects of electrocatalysis on well-defined electrodes (single-crystals, electrodes modified with molecular catalysts or proteins) using a variety of experimental and computational techniques. Reactions of interest are:

a)      Fuel cell reactions, such as carbon monoxide oxidation, methanol and ethanol oxidation, oxygen reduction (Stanley Lai, Steven Kleyn, Gonzalo Garcia, Paramaconi Rodriguez)
b)      Nitrogen cycle electrocatalysis, specifically nitrate and nitrite reduction (Matteo Duca, Yang Jian)
c)      Electrochemical fuel production, i.e. oxygen evolution and carbon dioxide reduction (Klaas Jan Schouten)
d)      Electrochemistry of biomass (Youngkook Kwon)
e)      Electrochemistry of water (Janneke van der Niet, Andrey Koverga)

The techniques that we use are the following:

a)   Electrochemical techniques, voltammetry, impedance spectroscopy, rotating ring-disk voltammetry
b)      Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy, both internal and external reflectrion
c)      Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS)
d)      Online electrochemical mass spectrometry
e)      UHV modeling (with Ludo Juurlink)
f)       Electrochemical Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) (with Alex Yanson)
g)      Density Functional Theory calculations
h)      Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations