Max Marcus is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Keble.
He completed his MSc and DPhil at Oxford, and was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick University before returning to Oxford as a Post-Doc. He has been teaching maths and physical chemistry since his DPhil, and teaches the core courses to first year students at Keble. He is also a Post-Doc at Princeton University (remotely) and teaches at other colleges.
Max’s research focusses on the interaction of quantum mechanics and chemistry, namely how quantum effects (such as entanglement) can influence the chemistry of materials and reactions, and how we can harvest such effects to our advantage. On a daily basis, this means dealing with noisy open quantum systems, the current frontier of theoretical chemistry. These systems tend to be very hard to model due to the large number of degrees of freedom within the systems, and the inherently stochastic nature of noise within them. But, understanding how these systems transport energy (usually in form of an electronic excitation) is crucial in order to design more advanced materials, for instance for solar energy capture but also for computing.