Jim de Ruiter is a PhD candidate in the Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis (ICC) group at Utrecht University. During his PhD journey, he tries to understand the copper catalyzed electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO₂RR) using various types of vibrational spectroscopy techniques. Currently, he is mainly working with (time-resolved) Raman spectroscopy, as this is a great tool to simultaneously probe the active copper surface, electrolyte species and reaction intermediates. In his talk he will show how we could identify the chemical landscape of a copper catalyst at different cathodic and anodic potentials and how we were able to differentiate between deterministic and stochastic catalytic routes of CO₂-to-CO formation at low overpotentials. Moreover, they found that dynamic rearrangement of well-defined copper nanoparticle surfaces changes the active site, allowing us to elucidate the dynamics of C-C coupling intermediates.