Three new Max Planck Graduate Center Fellows elected
We are very happy to announce that the Max Planck Graduate Center for Quantum Materials grew by three new members. J.C. Séamus Davis, Claudia Draxl and Jörg Wrachtrup were appointed as Fellows of the Max Planck Society within our Max Planck Graduate Center. This Fellow Programme promotes cooperation between outstanding university professors and Max Planck Society researchers and includes funding for a small working group at a Max Planck Institute. All three new Fellows will be actively enganged in the curriculum of the Center, beginning in November 2019.
J.C. Séamus Davis is a leading quantum physicist and head of a joint Irish-UK quantum research programme split between the University of Oxford and the University College Cork. His research interests include the macroscopic quantum physics of superconductors, superfluids and supersolids, the structure of complex electronic matter found in transition metal oxides and heavy fermion systems, and the development of new atomic-scale imaging techniques for physics and biology. Among his numerous honours and awards are the Fritz London Memorial Prize (2005), the Kamerlingh Onnes Prize (2009), membership in the US National Academy of Sciences (2010), and the St. Patrick’s Day Science Medal of the Science Foundation of Ireland (2016).
Claudia Draxl is an internationally renowned scientist in the field of theoretical and computational materials science holder of the Chair of Theoretical Solid State Physics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has a wide scope of scientific interests and activities, including the quantum-based description of radiation-matter interactions and the theory of organic semiconductors, and she is a leading authority of big-data-driven materials research. Among many other honours, she received the Ludwig-Boltzmann Award of the Austrian Physical Society (1996), an honorary doctorate of Uppsala University (2000), the Beller Lectureship of the American Physical Society (2008), and an Einstein Professorship (2011). Since 2018, she is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Jörg Wrachtrup is an internationally acclaimed pioneer of quantum technology and Professor of Physics at the University of Stuttgart. He established quantum defects in diamond as a key platform for quantum information processing and storage, quantum simulation, and most notably quantum sensing, which has now been adopted by numerous research groups and technology companies worldwide. He has won numerous national and international awards, including the Leibniz Prize (2012), the Max Planck Research Award (2014), the Zeiss Research Award (2016), and two subsequent Advanced Grants of the European Research Council. Since 2018, he is an elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.