Academic retreats are serious business. They are not only about professional exchange on scientific questions, but also about overarching goals and strategies. It can be worthwhile to add new formats such as a World Café to the traditional retreat programme. The CatLab team tried this out.Read More →
A group of 14 volunteers gathered one week on Zoom. From morning coffee until late in the night, they tackled intricate problems and worked out great solutions based on machine learning for digital twins of batteries or for predicting cracks in materials. “This year, we had the most successful hackathon so far, it was incredible,” says HZB data scientist Gregor Hartmann, who initiated the Hackathon. Many problems in research require a deep understanding of the material as well state of the art knowledge in methods of artificial intelligence. “You need this very close collaboration between the domain scientists and the data scientists, says Gregor Hartmann,Read More →
By Ivona Kafedjiska. The doctoral researchers at HZB who are working in the field of solar cells might all have different research interests and varying educational backgrounds, but we all agree on one point: attending the QUANTSOL summer school in Hirschegg, Austria is a must.Read More →
Adopting the reader’s perspective might help to set your proposal into a broader context and suggest relevant potential impact Some weeks ago, EU expert Seán McCarthy gave a workshop at HZB entitled “How to Write a Competitive Proposal for Horizon 2020”. The lecture hall was packed with scientists waiting for instructions and McCarthy delivered plenty. “The secret is understanding the evaluation process”, McCarthy pointed out. In other words: Put yourself into the shoes of the evaluators who will read your proposal and make the decisions. Peer reviewers want facts at a glance, details by further reading Scientific experts who may not be native English speakersRead More →
The Summer Student programme is on the way. After the first two weeks, I have had the opportunity to discover, not only my project, but also, the opportunity to meet colleagues from all over the world, and to discover a country and an unknown city to me until now. The title of the project is “Synthesis and tomographic analysis of metallic cellular materials”. The aim of this project is to produce cellular materials of titanium and magnesium with different percentages of porosity and different size of pores, which have potential applications in the replacement of hard tissue. To succeed in this project, I am learningRead More →
At the Interdisciplinary conference on „INNOVATION IN SOLAR BUILDING SKINS & ENERGY EFFICIENCY TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE CITIES”, 19th to 20th march in Berlin, experts from the building sector, politics, finance and photovoltaics discussed why Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) is not already more widely applied in buildings (see also HZB-webinfo ) and what innovations are still needed. Statements from participants of the conference: Lighthouse projects show what is possible Impressive projects by architects and engineering offices demonstrate what can be done already: Elegant modern buildings with solar facades and solar active materials for windows, pavements or other surfaces do not only provide energy and mitigate climateRead More →
An unusual science conference (not only) for young female scientists: April 29-30, 2018 Near the city of Goslar in the beautiful Harz mountains, an unusual science meeting is organised. The location is the Mönchehaus Museum (www.moenchehaus.de). I was attending this conference some years ago and I can really recommend it. The speakers are exclusively very renowned women in materials science, heading institutes at MIT, MPG or other prestigious research institutions. And multiple occasions are given to get into exchange with them. Discussions were open and vivid, and I guess many young women got motivated to strive for a scientific career. The organiser, Prof Katarina Al-Shamery, CarlRead More →
Romania joined the European Union in 2007, continuing to be one of the poorest of its member states – for comparison, Germany’s GDP is currently €38 000 whereas Romania’s is instead €8 600. However through education and research a way to a better future can be paved. It was for this reason that we went on the road in October 2017. We wanted to tell our Romanian colleagues about the different possibilities that European light sources offer to their research, and about which funding possibilities they could apply for. Hardly any of them were aware that the use of the facilities is free ofRead More →
Last week 50 scientists from all over the world have gathered at BESSY II. Physicists or chemists, experimentalists or pure theoreticians. It was an interdisciplinary crowd, discussing openly and in an extraordinary friendly way about new and sometimes hypothetical processes in hybrid nanomaterials, how to model them and how to explore and characterizethem experimentally. Freigeist fellow Dr. Annika Bande has invited to this big workshop, sponsored by Volkswagen Foundation. Together with her young team, the theoretical chemist is modelling the dynamics of electrons in semiconductor materials , which upon miniaturization give rise to so called quantum dots. The result: Exchange and new ideas Her goalRead More →