CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter
Cluster of ExcellenceCUI: Advanced
Imaging of Matter
Imaging of Matter
Mildred Dresselhaus Award 2024 goes to Sonia Coriani and Laura Cattaneo
23 July 2024
Photo: private
Prof. Sonia Coriani (left) and Dr. Laura Cattaneo are being honored for their outstanding scientific work and invited for research stays at the Cluster.
Prof. Sonia Coriani from the Technical University of Denmark and Dr. Laura Cattaneo from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics Heidelberg, Germany, will be honored within the Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship Program 2024 of the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI). The Program includes an extended research stay at the Cluster of Excellence "CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter" as well as prize money of €20,000 for the Senior Award and €10,000 for the Junior Award.
The Senior Award goes to Prof. Sonia Coriani from the Technical University of Denmark for her outstanding contributions to the development of rigorous and highly accurate electronic-structure methods to simulate steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopy across different frequency regimes, in particular soft X-ray, and their application for the interpretation of cutting-edge experimental studies on molecular systems using advanced light sources. Sonia Coriani did her master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Modena, Italy, and completed her PhD in 2000 in theoretical chemistry at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
After her PhD, she was tenured Researcher and then Associate Professor at the University of Trieste, Italy. Since 2017 she has been Professor in Physical Chemistry at the Technical University of Denmark. In addition, she was Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2020-2023, COFUND senior fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in 2015-2016,
IEF-Marie Curie Fellow at Aarhus University in 2010-2012, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Oslo University in 2007-2011. Sonia Coriani is an elected member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Outstanding work in the field of spectroscopy
"My heartfelt congratulations to Prof. Coriani. She has done outstanding work in the field of spectroscopy and will bring very valuable expertise to Hamburg. The potential of working with her is extraordinary,” says her future host Robin Santra, who is a professor at Universität Hamburg, a lead scientist at DESY and a board member of the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter”.
Sonia Coriani: "I am profoundly honored and humbled for having been awarded the 2024 Mildred Dresselhaus guest professorship in recognition of my scientific achievements, and to see my name listed together with those of the esteemed female scientists who were awarded it in the past. As a theoretical chemist and computational spectroscopist, this unique opportunity to work within the CUI Cluster of Excellence and scientifically interact with its outstanding scientists, experimentalists and theoreticians alike, is a dream come true. I look forward to engaging in many scientific discussions and exciting new collaborations and to serving as a role model for young female researchers, hopefully contributing to attract more women in STEM."
The Junior Award goes Dr. Laura Cattaneo, head of the independent Ultrafast Liquid Crystal Dynamics (ULCD) group at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Cattaneo is an expert for the assembly and characterization of liquid crystal samples, the development of liquid crystal flat jets, the generation of high harmonics, and time resolved THz dynamics in liquid crystals. She completed her PhD in 2011 in experimental physics at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, entirely dedicated to the fabrication and characterization of different types of nanomaterials and continued with her first postdoc in the Spectroscopy of Solids and Interfaces group at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, working on the optical properties of liquid crystal within an International Training Network (ITN) project and in collaboration with both academic and industrial partners. In 2014, she became a postdoc in the group of Ultrafast Laser Physics at ETH Zurich, in 2020 she started her own group in Heidelberg. She built from scratch a laser lab with two independent lines of investigation (THz and HHG), and a sample preparation lab, with a multitude of home-made devices.
New expertise on non-equilibrium phenomena in complex materials
“I warmly congratulate Dr. Cattaneo,” says Prof. Dr. Ángel Rubio, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter and a board member of the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter”. “Given the cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional research path Dr. Cattaneo has pursued, she has clearly demonstrated creativity, independence, and the ability to initiate and conduct new lines of research from scratch. She brings new expertise on non-equilibrium phenomena in complex materials, in particular on understanding the dynamical processes in liquid crystals. Moreover, and very importantly, Dr. Cattaneo, has also taken a prominent role in teaching and mentoring students.”
Laura Cattaneo: "I am grateful and honored to join the Mildred Dresselhaus guest professorship program. Grateful for the recognition of what I have been able to accomplish so far as a scientist, as a woman and a mother. Honored because I have deep admiration for Professor Dresselhaus herself, as well as for all the female scientists who have received this award before me. Likewise, I find this program a unique opportunity to broaden my network of collaborations within the framework of the CUI cluster of excellence, for which I am looking forward to."
