Dr. Raul Garcia Diez wins the Dissertationspreis Adlershof 2017
Dr. Raul Garcia Diez was awarded for his PhD Thesis with the Dissertationspreis Adlershof 2017.
Jury with nominees and the winner, Dr. Raul Garcia Diez, (left), Photo: Matthias Brandt
With his talk on the properties of nanoparticles and how they can be measured more accurately at BESSY II, Dr. Raul Garcia Diez convinced the jury and was awarded the Dissertationspreis Adlershof 2017. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, IGAFA e. V. and the WISTA MANAGEMENT GmbH are the sponsors of this prize endowed with 3000 Euros. Garcia Diez completed his PhD in 2017 at PTB and TU Berlin and is now active as a post-doctoral researcher at HZB.
The use of nanoparticles in medicine is continuously growing, for example as platforms for drug-delivery or encapsulating imaging agents. In order to tailor nanoparticles for these applications, the functional properties of these particles need to be well understood.
In his thesis on "Characterization of Nanoparticles by Continuous Contrast Variation with Small-Angle X-ray Scattering" Raul Garcia Diez developed a method to study nanoparticles in a realistic environment with X-ray small-angle scattering in order to gain valuable information. The work was carried out with the HZB SAXS instrument, which is operated at the FCM beamline of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in BESSY II under the cooperation between PTB and HZB.
With his work at PTB with Prof. Matthias Richter, he obtained his PhD title in May 2017 at the TU Berlin. Since then, Garcia Diez is a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Marcus Bär at the HZB.
- Helmholtz Doctoral Award for Hanna TrzesniowskiDuring her doctoral studies at the Helmholtz Centre Berlin, Hanna Trzesniowski conducted research on nickel-based electrocatalysts for water splitting. Her work contributes to a deeper understanding of alkaline water electrolysis and paves the way for the development of more efficient and stable catalysts. On 8 July 2025, she received the Helmholtz Doctoral Prize, which honours the best and most original doctoral theses in the Helmholtz Association.
- New department at HZB: ‘AI and Biomolecular Structures’Since 1 July 2025, Dr. Andrea Thorn has been setting up the new AI and Biomolecular Structures department at HZB. A biophysicist with many years of experience in AI-based tools for structural biology, she is looking forward to collaborating closely with the macromolecular crystallography team at the MX beamlines of BESSY II.
- Almost 4,000 People at the Long Night of the Sciences at HZBHelmholtz-Zentrum Berlin was delighted to welcome nearly 4,000 visitors to its Adlershof campus for the Long Night of the Sciences. It was a fantastic celebration of science, and we thank all our guests for their great interest.