Ricarda is the Administrative Director and a member of the Managing Board of the Weizenbaum Institute, the German Research Institute for the Networked Society.

She studied physics at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and received her doctorate in 1998 from Humboldt University of Berlin in the field of X-ray structure analysis. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) of the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) in Amsterdam. After starting a family and returning to Berlin, she turned to science management. From 2006 to 2012, she was Chief Research Manager for "Structure of Matter" at the Helmholtz Association, and from 2012 to 2022, she served as Deputy Secretary General and Head of the Academic Affairs Department at the Leibniz Association, where she was responsible for strategic organisation-related issues, such as the founding of the Leibniz Leadership Academy.

In her current role, communication, leadership, and general management shape her everyday life. Ricarda is fascinated by the people she works with: The brightest scientists from a wide range of disciplines come together to conduct impressive and highly relevant research, and dedicated administrators contribute to ensuring optimal research conditions at an institute where the results reflect the highest scientific standards and the work and leadership culture is characterized by a strong value-based compass and attitude.

 

Annabelle is a theoretical physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich whose work focuses on understanding strongly interacting quantum many-body systems, such as electrons in solids or ultracold atoms in optical lattices.

She uses a combination of state-of-the-art numerical methods, intuitive physical models, close collaboration with quantum simulation experiments, and machine-learning techniques to extract insights from complex quantum data. Among her contributions are using “snapshots” of quantum states to identify hidden patterns (for example, in the Hubbard model) and developing interpretable neural-network architectures to classify and understand many-body quantum states. Her work bridges the gap between abstract theoretical models, highly controllable experimental platforms, and quantum materials, with the aim of revealing how complex quantum matter behaves in real systems.