News

D. Avadanii

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!

M. Sarebanzadeh

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!

X. Fang

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/

I. Westermann, KIT

In the newly launched EU project NANO-S-MART, researchers at the IAM-MMI are investigating the material cycle of steel production in order to minimize losses in our society's consumption of raw materials in the future with intelligent material design and closed material cycles.

C. Mattheck

The KIT Presidential Board has approved a further extension of Prof. Dr. Claus Mattheck's status as KIT Distinguished Senior Fellow until the end of 2028. With this special award, KIT honors outstanding personalities from science in order to preserve their experience and knowledge even after retirement.

X. Fang

In October, Alexander Frisch, Oliver Preuß and Xufei Fang won the $1,500 Roland B. Snow Award as part of the annual ceramographic poster competition at MS&T24/ACerS (American Ceramic Society) in Pittsburgh (USA).

Alexander is a PhD student in the Dislocations in Ceramics group. He is working within the project MECERDIS on ductile oxides at room temperature and the effects of external fields on dislocation behavior in oxides. We would like to thank the ERC for funding his doctoral project.

X. Fang

Chukwudalu (Dalu) Okafor was awarded the 2nd poster prize at the ECI Conference on Nanomechanical Testing in Materials Research and Development IX (October 2024, Sicily, Italy) - THE nano-/micromechanics conference for the relevant community.

Dalu is pursuing his PhD in the group Dislocations in Ceramics and is working on point defects - dislocations interaction in oxides. Funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for his PhD project is gratefully acknowledged.

Maria Vrellou was awarded the "2025 EUROfusion Bernard Bigot Researcher Grant" (ERG) in September. The EUROfusion consortium has awarded a total of sixteen such research grants to talented post-doctoral researchers across Europe. The ERG grants enable young scientists to develop innovative ideas and techniques to advance the EUROfusion roadmap for fusion energy.