News

A. Richter

Richard Schütz and Cornelius Baumgartner took first place in the field of technology at the Jugend Forscht Regional Competition 2026 in Pforzheim with their "Optimization of 3D printing paths using stress analysis for higher component stability".

The work was created as part of the KIT - Hector Seminar 2025 cooperation at the IAM, where Richard (Heisenberg-Gymnasium Bruchsal) and Cornelius (Gymnasium Neureut, Karlsruhe) invested their spare time in FEM analyses, 3D printing and materials testing.

Congratulations - we would be delighted to see Richard and Cornelius again one day as students at KIT, because young talents with an enthusiasm for technology are in exactly the right place here.

J. Ding

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!

Fotostudio Eidens-Holl

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.

E. Okotete

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.

P. Lorson

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.

A. Medina

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!

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/