Carsten grew up in Essen, Germany. After finishing high-school at the Carl-Humann Gymnasium he enrolled in the chemistry program at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 1989. In 1992, he joined Karl Wieghardt’s group to study transition metal complexes and graduated from his group with a Diploma Thesis on “Synthesis of sulfur- and selenium functionalized macrocyclic ligands and their coordination chemistry” in 1994. When Karl Wieghardt was appointed as director of the Max-Planck Institut für Strahlenchemie, Carsten was amongst the first generation of graduate students to move with Karl to the Max-Planck Institute in 1995. There, his focus shifted from MAKING transition metal complexes to STUDYING transition metal complexes with a wide variety of physical methods. He had the unique and career-changing opportunity to work with Eckhard Bill, who moved from Alfred Trautwein’s group in Lübeck to join the Max-Planck Institute at that time. In particular, Carsten learnt various methods, including SQUID susceptibility, and Mössbauer and EPR spectroscopies, as well as the associated spin Hamiltonian formalism from Eckhard and graduated in 1997 with a PhD Thesis on “Magnetic exchange interactions in linear tetranuclear transition metal compounds” from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
In 1997, Carsten joined Boi-Hanh (Vincent) Huynh’s group at Emory University as a postdoc and continued to use Mössbauer and EPR spectroscopies to study a wide variety of iron-containing enzymes and models thereof. In particular, he focused -starting on day one of his postdoc- on studies of the class Ia ribonucleotide reductase, which Vincent’s group studied in collaboration with Marty Bollinger’s group at Penn State. After 5 productive years in Vincent’s group, Carsten joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Pennsylvania State University in 2002, where he continued to study non-heme-iron enzymes with Marty. Since 2004, he has a co-appointment in the Department of Chemistry. He expanded his research program with Marty on studies on various mono- and dinuclear non-heme-iron enzymes and founded a joint group with Marty in 2005. He also collaborates extensively with Squire Booker, Amie Boal, and Alexey Silakov at Penn State, as well as several other research groups, on the Mössbauer-spectroscopic characterization of iron-containing enzymes and models thereof.
When he is not focused on iron-containing enzymes, he likes to brew (and drink) beer with friends, to bake (and eat) bread and cakes, to read (non-scientific) books, and to listen to classical music.