Mesoporous materials, i.e. materials with a pore dimension in the range of 2 – 50 nm, have a range of promising application prospects, ranging from biomedical applications to catalysis. However, in most cases, also the morphological characteristics of the materials are at least as important as their structure on the nanometer scale. A lot of our synthetic efforts are therefore put on a parallel control of the material morphologies on several length scales. This includes the development of syntheses leading to particles of controlled size and shape, and also processing of thin films based on dip-coating and spin-coating.

Furthermore, we also concentrate on developing synthesis routes towards mesoporous materials with controlled morphologies based on hard templating approaches, where mesoporous materials with pre-defined morphologies are used as sacrificial molds, thereby extending the range of chemical compositions that can be accessed in the form of controlled morphologies.