Henriette Herz Scouting Program

AvH: Henriette Herz scouting program

I applied last year for the Henriette Herz Program, as I sfully 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 can offer up to three fellowships given by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung over 2022–2024 , 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. There is a lot of support across the institute for newcomers in the country and in Düsseldorf. The city is not too small, but not too big, there is good public transport and train connections to the rest of Germany and Europe (Brussels, paris) and a very active airport with direct flights to the US, the UK, and most countries in Asia (when travel is authorised of course...).

For these two-year fellowship with topical freedom, I seek profiles that are not within our group's conventional research activity. At the moment, we are active in the study of many materials systems, from structural alloys to magnets to thermoelectrics. We are increasingly diversifying too working on some natural and artificial minerals for intance, but also catalysts and batteries. 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!

I will work closely with the selected candidate to develop projects in these new areas - try to ease their way into working here . I hope this will help develop expertise and help you build a scientific career in academia or outside. You would benefit from our mentoring and network of MPIE and a great collaborative environment. These fellowships are dedicated to improve diversity in science and give more chance to candidates that can sometimes be overlooked, and the first fellowship will go to a woman, who will join a group that is already rather diverse and open to new ideas ! The group page is here: link and any of the colleagues can be contacted to ask about how we function.

If you are interested, please contact me, and we can discuss about possible topics :)

All projects can make 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.