HZB expert appointed chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Barcelona Research Centre
Prof. Dr. Susan Schorr © CCEM
Prof. Dr. Susan Schorr has been appointed to the newly established Scientific Advisory Board of the Barcelona Research Centre in Multiscale Science and Engineering and elected as its chair.
The Barcelona Research Centre in Multiscale Science and Engineering (CCEM) is part of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. It is one of the world's leading centres for materials science, particularly in the fields of micro- and nanotechnology, nanotechnology and biomaterials. In 2024, the CCEM received the ‘Excelencia María de Maeztu’ accreditation of excellence. It promotes internationally renowned research institutes that contribute significantly to the further development of Spain as a centre of science and technology.
The CCEM's Scientific Advisory Board comprises a total of seven experienced scientists from Italy, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.
Susan Schorr heads the ‘Structure and Dynamics of Energy Materials’ (SE-ASD) department at the Helmholtz Centre Berlin and is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Free University of Berlin. With her team at HZB, she researches fundamental structure-property relationships of materials for energy conversion, including novel materials for solar cells.
HZB expertise in advisory boards, committees and scientific commissions
Twenty-five scientists from HZB are currently involved in scientific advisory boards, supervisory boards or similar advisory bodies. There, they contribute their recognized expertise and critical assessments, which help to ensure well-founded decisions.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- 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.