Congratulations to Dr. Jinxue Ding on being promoted to an Associate Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Zhengzhou University in China!
Jinxue worked previously as a Postdoc in the Dislocations in Ceramics group (funded by the ERC-Starting Grant) at IAM-MMI.
We wish Jinxue great success and a fulfilling journey ahead in her new role!
Roshan Ram Rajakrishnan successfully defended his dissertation „Modelling the post-yield and post necking behaviour of irradiated F/M steels“ on 18 December, 2025. His work advances the robust modelling of ductile damage in irradiated materials, taking into account finite deformations and local geometric instabilities — an important step toward enhanced design rules, particularly those aimed at preventing immediate plastic flow localization. Congratulations!
The Environmental Foundation (Umweltstiftung) of Sparkasse Karlsruhe and the KIT are awarding Dr.-Ing. Johanna Naumann the Sparkassen Environmental Award (Sparkassen Umweltpreis) 2025 for her doctoral thesis “Electrochemical Cell Modeling of Hierarchically Structured Electrodes in Lithium-Ion Batteries.” The award ceremony will take place in summer 2026.
Johanna was a research assistant in the Cluster of Excellence POLiS and an associate doctoral candidate in the DFG Research Training Group SiMET. With her thesis Johanna makes an important contribution to the urgently needed improvement of electrochemical energy storage for the energy transition.
At the MS&T25 conference (Columbus, Ohio, US), the research paper by Chukwudalu (Dalu) Okafor and co-authors was awarded as one of the outstanding articles published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) for the publishing year of 2024.
The article ‘Near-surface plastic deformation in Polycrystalline SrTiO3 via room-temperature cyclic Brinell indentation’ was presented by Dalu at the 2025 ACerS Journal Award Symposium. His oral presentation also wins the Graduate Excellence in Materials Science (GEMS) Diamond Award, organized by ACerS Basic Science Division.
Sabrina Lang and Filiz-Pinar Seren were each awarded Best Poster at the 76th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry 2025 (ISE, Mainz). Both are PhD candidates in the group Battery Materials: Reactions and Degradation.
Sabrina was researching on interface degradation in solid-state batteries, with a particular focus on using operando scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to study the evolution of voids at the lithium metal-solid electrolyte interface.
Filiz was recognized for her research on the operando light microscopy observation of lithium metal growth modes in liquid electrolytes and the crucial role of electrolyte depletion in realistic battery cells.
Camila Aguiar Teixeira successfully defended her dissertation “Understanding twinning mechanism and measuring twinning stress of the Cantor high entropy alloy applying micromechanical testing” on 23 June 2025. Her work advances our fundamental understanding on deformation twinning in FCC.
Congratulations!
On March 14, 2025, Johanna Naumann successfully defended her dissertation “Electrochemical Cell Modeling of Hierarchically Structured Electrodes in Lithium-Ion Batteries.” The thesis was written as part of the “POLiS-Post Lithium Storage” Cluster of Excellence.
Subject of the thesis is the optimization of electrodes for lithium-ion batteries with porous secondary particles, known as hierarchically structured electrodes, using a specially developed simulation model. Johanna thus provided crucial support for experimental work being carried out in parallel at KIT.
Congratulations!
Diana Avadanii has been awarded an Early Career Award at the E-MRS Spring Meeting 2025 in Strasbourg.
Diana’s research focuses on degradation phenomena at interfaces in solid-state batteries, a critical challenge in the development of next-generation solid-state energy storage systems. Her expertise lies in in-operando investigations - cutting-edge methods that allow real-time tracking and quantification of interfacial degradation during battery operation.
This award recognizes Diana’s innovative contributions to the field and highlights the impact of her work on the future of high-performance, reliable solid-state batteries.
Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition!
Maral Sarebanzadeh, Postdoc in the group Hydrogen Micromechanics, receives an Acta Student Award for her paper “Twin nucleation at grain boundaries in Mg analyzed through in situ EBSD and high-resolution DIC”, published in Acta Materialia.
Her work, which originated from her PhD, introduced a novel experimental setup combining in-situ EBSD and HRDIC to investigate twin nucleation during tensile deformation in pure magnesium.
Congratulations Maral!
Chukwudalu (Dalu) Okafor was awarded the 1st prize in the Best Student Poster Presentation Award during the EMA 2025 (Electronic Materials and Applications, Denver, Colorado, USA).
The work Dalu presented is on point defects - dislocations interaction in functional oxides.
Congratulations, Dalu!
Since 2017, the TRR 188 has been working at the TU Dortmund University, the RWTH Aachen University, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to gain a deeper understanding of forming induced damage processes. The aim is to predict damage quantitatively and influence it, for example, by changing the load path.
Further information on TRR 188 can be found here and at https://trr188.de/index.php/en/