HZB Researcher on the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society
Catherine Dubourdieu is head of the IFOX Institute at HZB and was elected now into the board of directors of the MRS.
In September 2019, Prof. Dr. Catherine Dubourdieu was elected into the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (MRS). The MRS is one of the largest scientific associations and has almost 14000 members from various areas of the natural sciences and engineering.
Catherine Dubourdieu heads the HZB-Institute IFOX (Functional Oxides for Energy Efficient Information Technology) and holds a professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin. She investigates the growth and properties of functional oxides and semiconductor materials with the aim of developing energy-efficient devices for information technology, that can be integrated on silicon chips. Over the past 15 years, the physicist has also established numerous collaborations with industry and holds 10 patents. She has already published over 140 articles in peer-review journals and has an excellent international network.
In the Materials Research Society Catherine Dubourdieu has been active for over 20 years, also in responsible functions. As of 2020, Catherine Dubourdieu will be a member of the MRS Board of Directors to support the global materials research community and provide a framework for the various disciplines to collaborate.
The MRS's mission is to advance international interdisciplinary materials research and technology for the benefit of the human society. It was founded in 1973 and today has around 14000 members from various areas of the natural sciences and engineering. The governance of the Society is the responsibility of the Board of Directors, composed of 6 officers and 18 directors, 15 of whom are elected by the membership. One third of the Board is renewed each year. Catherine Dubourdieu will serve in this position over the next three years.
- 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.