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Thomas Matthias Klapötke (born February 24, 1961 in Göttingen) is a German inorganic chemist. He was Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University of Glasgow from 1992 to 1997. Since 1997, he has been Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU).
Klapötke currently does research at the University of Munich with a group of about 30 employees, mainly on explosives. According to media reports, Klapötke directs the "only university chemistry lab in Germany that deals with defense".
A flavour of the "exciting" nature of his research interests comes from the "Things I Won't Work With" thread of the Chemistry blog "In The Pipeline", which introduces that day's topic thus : "But remember, N-amino azidotetrazole is the starting material for the work I'm talking about today. It's a base camp, familiar territory, merely a jumping-off point in the quest for still more energetic compounds. The most alarming of them has two carbons, fourteen nitrogens, and no hydrogens at all, a formula that even Klapötke himself, who clearly has refined sensibilities when it comes to hellishly unstable chemicals, calls exciting. ... The compound exploded in solution, it exploded on any attempts to touch or move the solid, and (most interestingly) it exploded when they were trying to get an infrared spectrum of it.
