About

Maren obtained her undergraduate education in chemistry at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, and developed an early interest in theoretical chemistry during her Master’s research in the group of Prof. Markus Reiher at ETH Zürich. She earned her MSc (Diplomchemikerin) in 2007 and completed her PhD at ETH Zürich in 2010, investigating structure-determining interactions in cluster chemistry. She subsequently joined the computational chemistry group of Prof. Ken N. Houk at UCLA as a DAAD-funded postdoctoral researcher. After a brief period in industry as a quantitative risk analyst, where she gained expertise in statistical modeling and data analysis, she returned to academia in 2014 as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck, supported by an FWF Lise-Meitner fellowship. There, she shifted her focus toward computational catalysis and predictive modeling of complex chemical systems. Maren received an FWF Stand-Alone grant in 2020 and established her independent research group in Innsbruck in 2021. She moved to TU Wien as an Assistant Professor shortly thereafter. In 2025, she completed her habilitation and was granted tenure, being promoted to Associate Professor. Her work focuses now on developing operando models for computational chemistry – closing the gap between modelling and experiment.