DR ANNA MCCONNELL

WISC  Chair 

 Junior Professor - University of Siegen (Germany)

Anna McConnell is from Christchurch, New Zealand and she received a B.Sc.(Hons.) degree in Chemistry from the University of Canterbury in 2005. She then carried out her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford under the supervision Prof. Paul Beer and in 2010 she obtained a DPhil in Inorganic Chemistry. Her doctoral research focused on the synthesis of ion-pair receptors and interlocked structures, such as rotaxanes and catenanes.

 

Anna joined the research group of Prof. Jackie Barton at the California Institute of Technology from 2010 until 2013 as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Chemistry and Lindemann Fellow. Her research investigated the design and synthesis of luminescent probes for DNA and RNA base mismatches as diagnostic probes for cancer. From 2013 until 2016 she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Chemistry in the group of Prof. Jonathan Nitschke the University of Cambridge where she investigated metal-organic cages.

 

From November 2016 until April 2023 she was a Junior Professor in the Otto Diels Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Kiel in Germany before joining the University of Siegen as a Junior Professor in Organic Chemistry. Her research group investigates the design and self-assembly of stimuli-responsive metal-organic cages, in particular light-responsive and spin-crossover cages, as well as the dynamic covalent chemistry of reductively coupled iminoboronates.