Professorship of Functional Materials for Food Packaging

Welcome to our homepage. We are a recently established research group in the Department of Life Science Engineering (LSE) of the TUM School of Life Sciences (SoLS) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Our offices and laboratories are situated at the TUM Weihenstephan Campus in Freising, Germany. Please scroll through these pages to learn more about our research, the team, and our activities at TUM. 

Our research efforts are driven by the notion that innovative materials and solutions in materials preparation will pave the way for the future development of improved technologies. The research we pursue in the Schrettl Lab aims at the development of novel types of functional polymer materials, with a particular focus on applications in the domain of food packaging.

Functional materials are generally those that can change, adapt, and react in a precise and defined manner when they are exposed to an external stimulus. Examples of such stimuli are changes in temperature, exposure to light of a defined wavelength, an applied electric or magnetic field, mechanical stresses, and many more. In functional polymer materials, the applied stimulus typically triggers changes on the length scale of individual molecules. Such changes are then translated from the molecular scale to the macroscopic world. 

Polymer materials that feature such a responsive behavior can adapt to their environment in a useful manner. Polymer materials with such advanced functionalities are envisioned to enable fundamentally new technologies and contribute to a more sustainable use of resources in the future. We wish to contribute to these important research goals by combining chemical synthesis, polymer chemistry, and self-assembly methods to control the structure and function of materials. You will find more details about the group and our work on the pages of our homepage.