Thomas Schlathölter did his PhD on molecule-surface interactions in the group of Werner Heiland at the University of Osnabrück in 1996 with long research stays at the Université de Paris Sud in Orsay. He joined the Kernfysisch Versneller Institute in Groningen with a Marie-Curie individual postdoctoral fellowship from 1996. In 1998, he was awarded the Max-Auwärter Prize for his PhD thesis. From 2001 until 2006, Schlathölter was a Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and started his work on biomolecular mechanisms underlying radiotherapy. In this period, he was employed as Universitair Docent the Kernfysisch Versneller Instituut, where he was promoted to Universitair Hoofdocent (UHD) in 2006. In 2007, Schlathölter spent a brief period as CNRS Chercheur Invité at the Université Piérre et Marie Curie, Paris.

In 2013 Thomas Schlathölter joined the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials as a UHD. Since that year, he has been PI of the research group Gas-phase Biomolecules and Energetic Interactions. The group experimentally studies the interaction of short laser and free-electron-laser pulses, synchrotron radiation, and heavy ions with complex biomolecular ions. Instrumentation is at the core of the research. For instance, currently, the team is developing a novel apparatus for the production of mass-selected and conformationally pure biomolecular ions. These ions will in the near future be used to investigate molecular mechanisms underlying heavy ion therapy, but also to study photoinduced conformational changes in biomolecules. Recent research highlights include the discovery of a novel multiple electron detachment process, triggered by the decay of radiation-induced inner-shell vacancies in DNA [1] and the pioneering use of soft X-ray spectroscopy for identifying protonation sites in gas-phase DNA [2]

Schlathölter is an international expert in his field, who has been involved, for instance as work-group chair, in numerous past and in two present EU COST networks. He chaired the Electronic and Atomic Collisions section of the Atomic and Molecular Physics division of the European Physical Society from 2015-2019. Currently, he serves as a member of the editorial board for The European Physical Journal D and for Molecules and he is on the Scientific and Educational Advisory Board (SEAB): Interdisciplinary Center for Cancer Therapies based on Nanotechnologies and Radiations (iNanoTheRad), University Paris-Saclay.

Since 2022, Thomas Schlathölter also held the position of Director of Academic Staff at the University College Groningen.

Three top articles between 2017 and 2023:

1. Wen Li, Oksana Kavatsyuk, Wessel Douma, Xin Wang, Ronnie Hoekstra, Dennis Mayer, Matthew Robinson, Markus Gühr, Mathieu Lalande, Marwa Abdelmouleh, Michal Ryszka, Jean Christophe Poully, Thomas Schlathölter, Charge reversing multiple electron detachment Auger decay of inner-shell vacancies in gas-phase deprotonated DNA, Chemical Science 12 (2021) 13177 – 13186
2. Xin Wang, Sivasudhan Rathnachalam, Klaas Bijlsma, Wen Li, Ronnie Hoekstra, Markus Kubin, Martin Timm, Bernd von Issendorf, Vicente Zamudio-Bayer, J. Tobias Lau, Shirin Faraji, and Thomas Schlathölter, Gas-phase conformation and electronic structure of a protonated oligonucleotide studied by soft X-ray spectroscopy, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 20 (2021) 11900-11906, 2021 PCCP Hot Article]
3. Stephanie Cazaux, Yann Arribard, Dmitrii Egorov, Julianna Palotás, Ronnie Hoekstra, Giel Berden, Jos Oomens, and Thomas Schlathölter, The sequence of coronene hydrogenation revealed by gas-phase IR spectroscopy, Astrophysical Journal 875 (2019) 27