Foster and grow research talent: Prof Mathias Senge

Senge’s research career brought him to Ireland in 2005 after much international research across Germany and the US, including Freie Universität Berlin, UC Davis, and University Potsdam. He was offered the position of Chair of Organic Chemistry in Trinity, and received a €3.7 million SFI Research Professor grant. Since then, he has run a successful research group, which investigates the chemistry of porphyrins, functional materials, and hydrocarbon scaffold molecules. Some of his recent work has included working with industry using light and compounds for cancer therapy. Senge is on the advisory board of US-based companies exploring brain cancer treatment. He has also been working on water remediation treatments: “breaking down pollutants in water, also using light and oxygen.”

The Senge group is comprised of twelve international researchers who work closely together. At any time they have up to 20 collaborations on the go and have produced over 430 joint publications. They have also secured over €22 million in direct research funding, competitive fellowships and awards to-date. The team has won two recent Irish Lab Awards, demonstrating the high quality of their research.

While Senge doesn’t get much lab time himself – indeed, he is currently often in Germany on a Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study of the Technical University Munich – he spends time coordinating much of the activities taking place within his lab. There is not much time sitting at the desk because his group focuses on experimental sciences. His students and co-workers spend their time “trying to make new molecules: mixing things up, trying to purify compounds.” As a result, the group is always very interactive. There’s a pipeline of researchers training new arrivals in the practical and safety aspects of working in a chemistry lab, particularly during the summer when they welcome Erasmus undergrads and interns from all over the world.

This is also true of their office where everything is interactive and mixed: “We have large shared offices, which are actually for two research groups. All the grad students and postdocs working in organic chemistry are located on the seventh floor of TBSI, so everybody knows everybody. They go for lunch together, they help each other with instruments, etc.”

Over the last few years the Senge group have had two major projects. One was a shared Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Project, in which five PhD students worked with Senge, and also worked with groups in Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Poland. Using chemical compounds, they used light to explore possibilities for cancer therapy and killing microbes, which is known as photodynamic therapy. This research led to some valuable results. They also received a large SFI grant for a collaboration with TU Dublin on photonics materials. This enabled them to experiment with making improved compounds for solar energy conversion, imagining in medicine and biomedical applications.

He is also working on a SFI award himself, focusing on how the properties of a molecule can change if you make alterations to its three-dimensional shape. This is also part of his current fellowship in Munich, where he established a materials-oriented subgroup. “The fascinating part of that is I have always worked with what’s called porphyrins. The red colour of blood, heme, is a porphyrin. The green colour of plants, chlorophyll is also a porphyrin. In nature they all contain metals - iron or magnesium. And what we were able to show was, if you change the 3-dimensional structure of these compounds, then even without the metals, they can do reactions that do not occur in nature.”

As demonstrated by his own work, he strongly values the opportunities and contacts that can be forged through international research. “Research groups always have visitors these days, and once you have 5-6 nationalities in your group, they have their own contacts. If you have someone from France, two or three years down the line you’ll have two or three other French students coming in. My ‘recruitment strategy’ then becomes automatic, because these visitors will hopefully like it, and they’ll come back for a PhD or Postdoc. You don’t really have to actually recruit anyone, because people come to you.” In addition, each year he welcomes two or three Trinity summer interns, giving them an opportunity to see the workings of a lab, and decide whether organic chemistry – or another discipline – ignites their interest.  “If you want to do high end science these days, it means collaborations, and collaborations means Ireland is too small. You must go abroad, and you need to have international collaborations. This is maybe easier for somebody with a foreign background. But everybody does it these days to one extent or the other.”

Senge also highly values public outreach. He and his group often visit primary schools for hands-on chemistry experiments. “Working in a research lab doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t do anything practical at the end of it,” he stresses. “I try to instil this idea in my group members.” About two years ago, the Senge group started collaborating with artists, and they currently have a visual artist in residence who also works with the National Gallery of Ireland. This gives the group “a different perspective.” Last January, for example, they invited an artist to collaborate with them who had never seen a chemistry lab. While the artist was there, the Senge group went about their usual workday in the lab, then afterwards they talked with the artist. “Now we have really changed how we think about colours and dyes because we look at things differently from them.” Collaborating with the arts, he explains, can lead to “something more interactive and more enjoyable. So, I think it’s wonderful to hear how much the arts and sciences are figuring out new ways to collaboration.”

When asked to give advice to anyone interested in joining a lab such as the Senge group, he recommends students “don’t worry about their specialisation.” When he was an undergraduate, he notes, “you studied chemistry, and the only place you could work was in your special area of chemistry.” In comparison, his graduates from the last 20 years gone on to work as patent lawyers, in finance, in the military, and in analytical sciences, in addition to the classic industry or academia jobs. Some ended up in science funding with SFI or with scientific publishers: “So, you are not fixed any more. Your specialisation only matters if you want to become a professor.”

He highlights that transferable skills are extremely important: “Employers want to know that you know your stuff, that you can quickly learn new skills, that you can write and understand business strategies, that you are good with people and outreach.” And it is the same in many ways for the Senge group: “I’ve had physicists, biologists, even medical people, joining my group. Everything has become more mixed. So, my advice is, don’t worry about specialisation. And that goes back to what I was saying earlier. With a mixed research group, things become easier. You have different cultures, backgrounds. And then people automatically become more open. And that means it becomes easier for everyone to look beyond just doing a chemical reaction in the lab.”

- Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen