She is currently a W3-Professor and the director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany, where she heads the Department of Inorganic Spectroscopy.
Serena DeBeer studied at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas (US), where she completed her bachelor program in chemistry, with minor in mathematics in 1995 (with honors).
In the Fall of 2009, she relocated to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (USA), where she accepted a faculty position as assistant professor at the department of chemistry and chemical biology.
Additionally, she is the group leader of the PINK beamline[4] project at the Energy and Materials In-Situ Laboratory[5] at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, Germany.
[8] This study was followed up later with the experimental evidence of a non-Hund spin configuration at the Mo atom by means of X-ray Magnetic Circular Dichroism (XMCD) spectroscopy.
The active site of this enzyme that enables the cleavage of the C-H of methane is a dinuclear Fe(IV) intermediate Q found in the hydroxylase protein (MMOH) of MMO.
Through applications of advanced X-ray spectroscopic studies like high-resolution XAS they characterized the key intermediate in biological methane oxidation as an open-core diiron structure (with FeIV=O motif).
[15] Recent work of DeBeer's group has focused on developing the full information content of various X-ray spectroscopic methods and their application to biological catalysts.
The setup that utilizes a laboratory X‑ray source (Metal Jet) in combination with a von Hamos full cylinder optic with Highly Annealed Pyrolytic Graphite (HAPG) crystal and a CCD detector.