Ernst Eckhard Koch Prize and Synchrotron Radiation Innovation Award

The Ernst Eckhard Koch Prize went to Dr. Victoriia Saveleva (right) for her work on catalysts.
Copyright: M. Setzpfandt/HZB

Laudator Prof. Gerd Schneider, award winners Dr. Christian David and Prof. Alexei Erko and Prof. Mathias Richter, Friends of HZB, (From left to right).
Copyright: M. Setzpfandt/HZB

The decisions between excellent proposals have not been easy for the two selection committees, Prof. Mathias Richter, chairman of the “Friends of HZB” pointed out.

The Ernst Eckhard Koch Prize went to Dr. Victoriia Saveleva for her doctorate at the University of Strasbourg on in-situ investigations of electrochemical processes using photoemission spectroscopy. Her experiments at BESSY II focused on reactions on catalyst surfaces of ruthenium and iridium during the electrolytic decomposition of water. Saveleva is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

The Innovation Award on Synchrotron Radiation 2018 went to Dr. Christian David, also from the Paul Scherrer Institute, and to Prof. Alexei Erko, who recently moved from the HZB to the Institute for Applied Photonics (IAP) in Berlin-Adlershof. The two physicists were honored for their innovative contributions to the application of diffractive X-ray optics, which enable complex X-ray experiments with high resolution. The laudation was held by Prof. Gerd Schneider from the HZB. This time it was not the "ring makers" who were honoured for developing the accelerators, but those who had cut the "diamonds for the ring", Schneider explained pictorially. The Synchrotron Radiation Innovation Award is sponsored by SPECS GmbH and BESTEC GmbH.

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