His scientific career was determined by his work on the use of NMR spectroscopy to measure molecular diffusion in nanoporous materials (zeolites), which he had already begun during his doctorate.

After his measurements, existing ideas had to be corrected by orders of magnitude, which led to a paradigm shift in the understanding of molecular mass transport in such systems.

Together with Paul Heitjans, he initiated the Diffusion Fundamentals conference series, which is devoted to the phenomena of random movement and propagation in their entirety.

The Dresden conference gave rise to the edition of a book on "Diffusive Spreading in Nature, Technology and Society", for which he, together with Armin Bunde, Jürgen Caro and Gero Vogl, was awarded the Literature Prize of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie in 2019.

[4] In 2020 he and Jürgen Caro, his first doctoral student, received the ENI award in the “Advanced Environmental Solutions” category for their work, which led to the development of micro-imaging methods for the observation of diffusive molecular flows in nanoporous materials.