Prof. Dr. Cristiane Morais Smith and Dr. Friederike Ernst receive the Mildred Dresselhaus Award 2016. The Mildred Dresselhaus Award is presented annually by the Cluster of Excellence „The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging“ (CUI) and comprises a certificate and a personal prize money of Euro 20,000 resp. 10,000 and is combined with a visiting professorship program at CUI.
Prof. Cristiane Morais Smith. Credit: Ivar Pel
The Senior-Award goes to the theoretical physicist Prof. Cristiane Morais Smith of University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, for her outstanding contribution to the understanding of topological phases in two-dimensional nuclear and electronic systems. Cristiane Morais Smith is a world leading specialist for condensed matter physics. Her broad spectrum of research activities include topics such as topological quantum matter, graphene physics, quantum Hall physics, high temperature superconductivity, quantum gas physics and nano-physics. Cristiane Morais Smith already has a long standing connection to the Hamburg research landscape via many extremely fruitful collaborations with CUI scientists, including projects with Prof. Daniela Pfannkuche, Prof. Alexander Lichtenstein, Prof. Klaus Sengstock, and Prof. Andreas Hemmerich. New collaborations could be envisioned with the groups of Prof. Andrea Cavalleri, Prof. Michael Thorwart and Prof. Peter Schmelcher.
Dr. Friederike Ernst. Credit: private.
Dr. Friederike Ernst receives the Junior-Award for her noteworthy contribution to the understanding of the properties of two-dimensional nano-materials. The physicist is currently working as a Postdoc at Standford University (US). She started her career in Berlin as a “table top” physicist in the field of optics and expanded her skills over the time in accelerator-based techniques for the structural analysis of thin materials that she performed at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) in the Argonne National Lab and the Linac Coheren Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US. Here she focused on the observation of the coupling behavior of single layers of transition metal dichalcogenides to each other. At SLAC she looked furthermore into the phase change mechanism in two-dimensional systems via the ultrafast electron diffraction. Within CUI she´ll work together with Prof. Alf Mews (Universität Hamburg).
The Mildred Dresselhaus Award is installed in the form of a Guest-Professorship and has been awarded already for the fourth time. “The prize is already established as an internationally visible award for younger and established researchers within the broad research area of CUI,” says CUI-board member Dr. Melanie Schnell from the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter gladly. “We are happy about the huge interest from brilliant candidates from home and abroad, because it puts us in the wonderful position to start or continue fruitful collaborations. In this sense I congratulate Prof. Dr. Cristiane Morais Smith and Dr. Friederike Ernst cordially.”