Fabien Cougnon is an Associate Professor in Synthetic Nanochemistry at the Nanoscience Centre & the Department of Chemistry at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥, Finland. He graduated from the University of Strasbourg (France) in 2006. He obtained a PhD in organic chemistry, specializing in supramolecular chemistry, from the University of Cambridge (UK) under the supervision of Prof. Jeremy K.M. Sanders. For his work on the dynamic combinatorial synthesis of unconventional donor-acceptor catenanes, he was awarded an EPSRC doctoral prize, which funded a nine-month postdoc in the group of Prof. David A. Leigh at the University of Edinburgh (UK). He then moved to the group of Prof. Elizabeth M. Nolan at MIT (USA) to investigate the role of antimicrobial peptides (humans defensins) in the chemistry underlying the human innate immune response. In December 2015, he started his independent career at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) with the support of an Ambizione fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He moved to Jyväskylä in 2021.
Our group is affiliated to the NanoScience Centre and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Jyväkylä, Finland. Our research interests revolve around the field of Molecular Nanotopology. Tying knots with molecules is a powerful way to control their conformational states and to generate unusual properties that would not be accessible otherwise. In our group, we are developing new synthetic strategies to access knotted molecules and we are investigating the effect of topology on their behaviour.
