Meet Jonathan Maurer

Jonathan develops advanced chromatographic methods for analyzing emerging biopharmaceuticals. His work investigates the behavior of large, complex molecules in liquid chromatography, establishes methods for assessing their critical quality attributes, and transfers those methods to industrial partners for regulatory characterization.

“Just as small molecules transformed medicine over the last century and monoclonal antibodies reshaped biopharmaceutical development in the 2000s, nucleic acid therapeutics are now opening a new era,” he says. With modalities increasingly combining components such as antibodies, lipid nanoparticles, and nucleic acids, no single technique can characterize every critical quality attribute. “I expect multidimensional liquid chromatography to become increasingly important both in R&D and in quality control and routine laboratories. Combined with automation and machine learning to explore large experimental spaces rapidly, it could make analytical method development far more powerful and ambitious.”

Yet scientific ambition is colliding with financial reality. “Reduced funding and rising costs for instrumentation, consumables, energy, and publication all put growing pressure on academic laboratories,” he says. “At the same time, the questions we are expected to answer are becoming more complex. We therefore have to find ways to do more, and better, with less.”

At the end of his PhD, Jonathan turned down a permanent laboratory position to pursue a postdoc in a different field. “To some people, turning down a permanent position in a public laboratory at a Swiss university sounded crazy,” he says. “But that decision opened doors I did not even know existed and shaped my career in ways I could never have anticipated.” His advice to younger scientists is not to underestimate the value of stepping into the unknown.

Outside science, cooking provides a familiar parallel: “It requires precision, reproducibility, and an understanding of how individual parameters interact. And, in both cooking and research, a little creativity usually helps.”