I had applied a few years ago for the Henriette Herz Program, as I fully support its philosophy of trying to make academia more diverse. This is a strong commitment of mine and has been for many years – I would be happy to put any interested party in contact with some of my former colleagues from the group who have moved on in industry or academia.
Through this program, I have offered three fellowships given by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung over 2022–2026 , with conditions similar to the conventional Humboldt Research Fellowship, which include a German language course in principle to help with integration in the local community.
For these two-year fellowship with topical freedom, I sought profiles that are not within our group's conventional research activity. This enabled scientists of a diverse background to join us and learn from our group and our group learning from them. We primarily use atom probe tomography – but not exclusively of course! A part of our research is also on pushing the the boundaries of atom probe analysis in particular for analysing hydrogen, lithium and frozen liquid-solid interfaces. And I would be very much opened to alternative suggestions!
All the fellows are actively making use of all facilities across the institute, including our 3 atom probes, scanning-electron microscopes, focused ion beams and transmission electron microscopes, synthesis facilities and mechanical testing facilities, and many more. We also have very nice collaborations with our theory colleagues and can access computational facilities from the Max Planck society. in case you are more interested in theory and simulations.
If you want to know more about the current projects in the group at MPIE, here is our project page: https://www.mpie.de/2891085/research_projects on MPIE's website and to know more about atom probe, there are lectures I recorded here.