Summer in the laboratory: 24 students from all over the world start their summer project
Group picture at arrival day at HZB. © S. Kodalle/HZB
For eight weeks the summer students are now working on a research project at the Helmholtz Centre Berlin. Experienced scientists of the HZB will support them. On Thursday, 30 August, they will present their results.
This year, 282 young people from all over the world applied to take part in the HZB's summer program. But only 24 places are available. Now the selected students can start their project. They come from 14 different countries, including Egypt, China, Cuba, Russia and Thailand, and study STEM subjects in Bachelor's or Master's programmes at their home universities. For many, the summer student program is the first step into research.
"Once again this year, many HZB researchers have signed up with project ideas for summer students and agreed to intensively support the students," says Gabriele Lampert, who coordinates the summer student program. "I know that this also means additional work, but the experience from recent years also shows that it is often worth it for both sides. Because it happens again and again that summer students come back later, for example for a doctorate, as cooperation partners or users.
Finally, the summer students will present their results on 30 August 2019 at 11:00. Three students will give a short lecture, all others will explain their project with a self-designed poster.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)
- Patterns of polar vortices in lead-free superlattices on siliconA team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO3/SrTiO3)10 superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies.
- HZB congratulates Peter Hegemann on winning the Nobel PrizeOur warmest congratulations go to Peter Hegemann, Professor of Neuroscience and Experimental Biophysics at Humboldt University in Berlin. Together with Prof. Georg Nagel (Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg) and Prof. Karl Deisseroth (Stanford University, USA), he has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. We are delighted for him, his team, Humboldt University and the entire Berlin scientific community.