Andrea Denker is Professor of "Accelerator Physics for Medicine"
Prof. Dr. Andrea Denker is the head of the department "Proton Therapy" at HZB. © HZB/ M. Setzpfandt
The Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) have appointed Prof. Dr. Andrea Denker to the joint professorship "Accelerator Physics for Medicine" as of October 1, 2018. Since 2006, Andrea Denker is head of the department "Proton Therapy" at the HZB, which operates the accelerator for eye tumor therapy. The therapy, offered in cooperation with the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the HZB, is unique in Germany.
As part of her professorship, Andrea Denker is taking on lectures in the "Physical Technology - Medical Physics" course at Beuth University. In the current winter semester she offers the lecture "Atomic and Nuclear Physics" for Bachelor students.
Even before her appointment, Andrea Denker was a lecturer at the university. "I enjoy this job very much and the contact with the students is very enriching for me and my team at HZB," says Denker. The appointment now creates an even closer connection to the university. "We are already looking forward to many interesting theses that will be written at the proton accelerator at the HZB.
Andrea Denker studied and received her doctorate in physics at the University of Stuttgart. Then she worked at the CSNSM (Centre de Sciences Nucléaires et de Sciences de la Matière) in Orsay, France. In 1995 Andrea Denker started as a scientist at the ion accelerator ISL. Among other things, she calculated and developed the beam parameters for eye tumor therapy, which was launched 20 years ago.
- Freeze casting - a guide to creating hierarchically structured materialsFreeze casting is an elegant, cost-effective manufacturing technique to produce highly porous materials with custom-designed hierarchical architectures, well-defined pore orientation, and multifunctional surface structures. Freeze-cast materials are suitable for many applications, from biomedicine to environmental engineering and energy technologies. An article in "Nature Reviews Methods Primer" now provides a guide to freeze-casting methods that includes an overview on current and future applications and highlights characterization techniques with a focus on X-ray tomoscopy.
- Clean cooking fuel with a great impact for southern AfricaBurning biomass for cooking causes harmful environmental and health issues. The German-South African GreenQUEST initiative is developing a clean household fuel. It aims to reduce climate-damaging CO2 emissions and to improve access to energy for households in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Spintronics: A new path to room temperature swirling spin texturesA team at HZB has investigated a new, simple method at BESSY II that can be used to create stable radial magnetic vortices in magnetic thin films.