About Macroarc

The Macroarc team was founded in 2008 by Christopher Barner-Kowollik upon moving from the Co-Directorship of the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany as Chair of Macromolecular Chemistry. In 2017, Christopher and the team relocated to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane – keeping a secondary research node at the KIT. In January 2026, the KIT presence of the team grew substantially, with Christopher taking on the directorship of the Institute of Functional Interfaces (IFG) at the KIT and the KIT node expanding considerably in size, with the QUT node continuing in parallel. The group’s home at the IFG is the Department of Photochemical Precision Materials. Both research nodes are highly integrative and are home to a series of senior staff scientists.

The team has grown from a humble beginning of twelve students and postdoctoral researchers in 2008 at KIT to now being a team of over 50 researchers.

We are housed at both research nodes in purpose-built modern laboratories. These are equipped with state-of-the-art synthetic facilities, cutting edge photochemical equipment (including wavelength tuneable laser systems and advanced laser laboratory at both nodes which include wavelength tuneable multi-colour SLA printers), and a materials characterisation suite for both small (NMR, EPR, HPLC, GC/MS, LC/MS, FTIR, UV-vis spectroscopy, and XRD) and large (high resolution ESI-MS, multi-detector SEC, DLS, DSC, TGA) molecules and materials. Some of this equipment is co-located in QUT’s state-of-the-art central analytical research facility (CARF), allowing QUT wide researcher acces.

The team has published nearly 800 peer-reviewed papers, which have been cited over 54,000 times. Macroarc has been home to over 210 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, over 100 honours, master and diploma students and has collaborated with more than 198 institutions from 30 countries all over the world. In addition to collaborations with academic partners, the team has many strong links with industrial partners with over 20 successful partnerships. Across three universities (UNSW – KIT – QUT) and two continents, Christopher has raised over 65M$ in research funding.