Ulrike is a Lise-Meitner-Research-Group leader for Organic Bioelectronics at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and works at the intersection between Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Science.
Ulrike and her group are interested in organic electronic materials such as semiconducting and conducting polymers and small molecules, the charge transport through these materials, and their application in flexible and stretchable electronic devices such as organic field-effect transistors and biosensors. Due to their printability, mechanical flexibility, and low Young's modulus that is in compliance with biological tissues, organic electronic materials and devices offer the potential to revolutionize personalized medicine and health monitoring applications.
Furthermore, it is Ulrike’s aim to characterize and develop environmentally friendly and biodegradable electronics for sustainable applications.

Leli works remotely as a Data Engineer at Mozilla. Data engineers' job is to make data usable for data analysts. That includes finding relevant data, bringing the raw data in a useful format, and then automating that process for constantly updating data. Each new dataset is a new puzzle to solve, understanding how it has been generated, what questions can be answered with it - and equally or more important, what questions can not be answered with the current data.

In her free time, Leli is a member of "feminismus und computer kram," an online hackspace for women, non-binary and trans folks, and loves to put LEDs on everything.

Marina has held a tenure track position (W1) at the physics faculty at the Philipps-University Marburg since 2021. Her research interests focus on the optical properties of organic and hybrid semiconductors. Molecular materials are very versatile building blocks for organic electronic devices, and the flexibility of this material class can be even further enhanced in heterostructures. To understand the processes emerging after the absorption of light, e.g., photocurrent generation in an organic solar cell, it is important to comprehend the photoexcitation dynamics in time-resolved experiments. Marina’s junior research group is specialized in time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy combined with spatially resolved experiments. With this framework of techniques, it is possible to gain insight into the fate of bound electron-hole pairs. These so-called excitons are the primary photoexcited species in organic semiconductors. A part of the group’s research is embedded in the CRC 1083 “Structure and Dynamics at internal interfaces”.

Celina is a Ph.D. student at the TU Braunschweig and is currently a member of the working groups Nanostructuring and Microsystems Technology at PTB. There she contributes to the further development of high-precision measurement methods of 3D microscopes.

To measure accurately and with high precision with a microscope, it must first be calibrated with so-called standards. But in 3D microscopy, it is not only necessary to calibrate the lateral and height scales but also the calibration of the flatness error of coordinate planes and the shear of coordinate axes. 3D standards meet these requirements. However, currently used 3D standards are manufactured with focused ion beams. Each standard is, therefore, a cost-intensive custom-made product that also requires time-consuming calibration. Celina and her colleagues are developing a wafer-based mask process to produce 3D standards. This way, many structures can be reproducibly produced and adapted to calibrate the respective device.

Elena is a Minerva group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (Munich). Since she was a child, she has been deeply fascinated by the night sky, but she also enjoyed chemistry. When, during her master's studies, she discovered the astrophysics branch of astrochemistry, it was love at first sight. Elena’s work aims at understanding how stars and planetary systems are born, using molecules as a probe to investigate the chemistry and physics of star-forming regions. The main targets of her research are the densest and coldest phases of the interstellar medium in the Milky Way, where protostars are about to form. In order to detect the faint emissions from different molecular species, she uses radio telescopes, such as the IRAM 30m antenna in Sierra Nevada, Spain, shown in the picture.

Franziska is an Assistant Professor at TU Delft and a Branco Weiss Fellow. Her research is broadly motivated by the complexity of clouds and approaches to capture this complexity – with the goal of better constraining the role of clouds in climate projections. Franziska is especially interested in the intriguing effects of cloud ice, the diverse interactions of clouds with atmospheric aerosol, and the marvelous patterns that cloud fields exhibit. Such patterns are strikingly visible in satellite images like the one behind her. Together with her group, she explores these phenomena by combining traditional process-based approaches and data science with concepts from complex systems theory. Before obtaining her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Physics from ETH Zurich, Franziska studied Physics at the University of Göttingen and completed her diploma thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization.

Munan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrochemical Studies at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. She is interested in learning where we come from - how stars and planets form in the universe. She uses supercomputers to simulate the movement of gas and dust in galaxies, which eventually collapse under gravity to form stars and planets similar to our solar system. Her research helps to answer the questions such as how efficiently stars can form in galaxies and what environments are suitable for planet formation. Munan is also passionate about bringing astronomy to the public. Recently she worked with Soapbox Science Munich to discuss the mystery of the Christmas Star (and what astronomers think about the appearance of stars in the sky) in this video.

Birgit is the leader of an independent Max Planck Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen. Her scientific focus is on experimental research in quantum optics and nonlinear photonics. At the heart of her research group is the interaction of light waves with sound waves – an effect that can enable versatile processing of optical information and manipulation of quantum states of light. The applications of her research lay within the areas of quantum technologies, such as secure quantum communication and novel optical computing approaches. Before Erlangen, she spent several years at the University of Sydney in Australia and earned her Ph.D. from the CNRS FEMTO-ST Institute in France.

A public talk on her science in German can be found here. 

Larysa is an ERC Consolidator grantee and the head of the research group 'Nano-Microsystems for Life Sciences' at Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR) in Germany. Their mission is the development of smart miniaturized biosensing devices and systems using nanoscale materials and advanced microfluidics as building blocks. These systems are very relevant to find new routes and parameters for the characterization of biomolecules and cells relevant for cancer.

Christina is currently writing up her Ph.D. work on ultrafast magnetism with extreme ultraviolet light in the group of Prof. Stefan Mathias at the University of Göttingen. Light with such short wavelengths (~ 20 nm) has many advantages for the investigation of different elements in complex magnetic materials, but it takes some effort to generate this light in the first step. This combination of laser and solid-state physics on the ultrafast timescale is what Christina enjoys the most. Her research paves the way to gain a microscopic understanding of the magnetic behavior after an optical excitation with a femtosecond laser pulse - a question that is still puzzling many researchers in the field.