Jerwin Jay Taping

Jerwin is a PhD student at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and ETH Zurich. He earned his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at UP Manila (Philippines), doing DFT calculations to investigate the peroxidase-like catalytic activity of nickel-pyridine macrocycles. He then spent a few years working as a chemist in the petroleum industry, where he developed his expertise in elemental analyses, gas chromatography, and atmospheric & vacuum distillation processes. In September 2021, he joined the Erasmus Mundus master program in Functional Advanced Materials Engineering (FAME+), eventually earning him a double master's degree in Materials Science & Engineering at Grenoble INP (France) and Chemistry at ULiège (Belgium). During this time, he completed a 3-month internship at the Département de Chimie Moléculaire (France), working on PNP-supported metal complexes for small molecule activation (CO₂ and N₂ reduction), and later carried out a master’s thesis at the Laboratory of Catalysis – MolSys (Belgium), studying ruthenium and iridium catalyst precursors for ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) applications. Driven by his interest in catalysis and advanced instrumentation, he joined PSI in April 2024 as a PhD student of the Operando Spectroscopy group. His research is focused on uncovering the structure-activity-selectivity relationships in heterogeneous catalysts for CO₂ hydrogenation to higher alcohols.