Helmholtz International Fellow Award for Nils Mårtensson
Nils Mårtensson, University of Uppsala, cooperates closely with HZB.
The Helmholtz Association has presented the Swedish physicist Nils Mårtensson with a Helmholtz International Fellow Award. The synchrotron expert of the University of Uppsala, who heads the nobel comitee for physics, cooperates closely with the HZB-Institute Methods and Instrumentation for Synchrotron Radiation Research.
Nils Mårtensson is a professor at Uppsala University. He directed the development of the Swedish synchrotron radiation source Max IV and received a grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2013. Mårtensson is a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics. At HZB, he cooperates with Alexander Föhlisch's team at HZB-Institute Methods and Instrumentation for Synchrotron Radiation Research. Together they run the Uppsala Berlin Joint Laboratory (UBjL) to further develop methods and instruments.
In 2018, the Helmholtz Association presented a Helmholtz International Fellow Award to five outstanding international scientists in this call for proposals. All of them have already worked closely with Helmholtz Centres and presented concrete plans to continue the cooperation. "We hope that they will also be ambassadors for further cooperation between their institutions and the Helmholtz Association," says Otmar D. Wiestler, President of the Helmholtz Association.
- MAX IV and BESSY II initiate new collaboration to advance materials scienceSwedish national synchrotron laboratory MAX IV and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) with BESSY II light source jointly announce the signing of a 5-year Cooperation Agreement. The new agreement establishes a framework to strengthen cooperation for operational and technological development in the highlighted fields of accelerator research and development, beamlines and optics, endstations and sample environments as well as digitalisation and data science.
- Michael Naguib is visiting HZB as a Humboldt Research AwardeeProfessor Michael Naguib, from Tulane University in the USA, is one of the discoverers of a new class of 2D materials: MXenes are characterised by a puff pastry-like structure and have many applications, such as in the production of green hydrogen or as storage media for electrical energy. During his Humboldt Research Award in 2025, Professor Naguib is working with Prof Volker Presser at the Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken and with Dr Tristan Petit at HZB.
- AI in Chemistry: Study Highlights Strengths and WeaknessesHow well does artificial intelligence perform compared to human experts? A research team at HIPOLE Jena set out to answer this question in the field of chemistry. Using a newly developed evaluation method called “ChemBench,” the researchers compared the performance of modern language models such as GPT-4 with that of experienced chemists.