Wolfgang Parak to receive the 2024 Elhuyar Goldschmidt Award

7 May 2024

Photo: UHH/Dingler

Prof. Wolfgang Parak from the Institute of Nanostructure and Solid State Physics is being honored with the Royal Society of Chemistry of Spain's (RSEQ) Elhuyar Goldschmidt Award 2024 for his scientific achievements.

Wolfgang Parak is Professor of "Experimental Physics with a focus on Bio-Nanostructure Sciences" and researcher in the Cluster of Excellence "CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter".

Since 1999, the Hermanos Elhuyar-Hans Goldschmidt Prize has been awarded jointly by the Royal Spanish Chemical Society (RSEQ) and the German Chemical Society (GDCh) to outstanding scientists from the partner country. In addition to prize money and a medal, the prize includes a series of lectures in the partner country.

The Elhuyar brothers, after whom the prize is named, were passionate mineralogists and chemists. They both studied in Paris and attended the Mining Academy in Freiberg. They continued their education by travelling throughout central and Northern Europe; in 1783 they published their research on the extraction of tungsten from wolframite. This made them the discoverers of tungsten.

The third namesake, chemist Hans Goldschmidt, was born in Berlin in 1861. He studied in Berlin and later at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, with whom he did his doctorate. In 1894, he developed the thermite process, which is still important today. This redox reaction made it easy to produce carbon-free metals such as iron, chromium and manganese, and is still very important in railway construction.