Since receiving an ERC Advanced Grant as well as the Spinoza Prize last year, Marc Koper has had plenty of room to unleash his curiosity on chemical processes on the surface of electrodes. Although his area of expertise represents the hope for a fossil-free future, Koper mainly wants to understand how it works, because current textbooks do not tell the complete story. Koper is one of the keynote speakers at the IUPAC | CHAINS world chemistry congress 2023.

In the mid-1980s, an article appeared in what was then called Chemisch Weekblad on Orde uit chaos, a translation of the book by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. Prigogine (1917 – 2003) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his description of thermodynamic systems that are not in equilibrium, where locally ordered structures emerge from chaos. The article put Marc Koper on the trail of electrochemistry.

Koper: ‘I was greatly intrigued by that subject, because it was something I had not encountered in my studies. Then I started reading more about chaos, and learned, for example, that a very simple mathematical equation can produce something that cannot be predicted. I even spent a year studying with Prigogine. Spending that time in an international community in Brussels at the Service de Chimie-Physique convinced me that I wanted to be a scientist.’