Mildred Dresselhaus Award 2025 goes to Teresa Pellegrino and Zala Lenarčič

15 May 2025

Photo: ITT (left), Marjan Verč (right)

Chemist Prof. Teresa Pellegrino (left) and physicist Dr. Zala Lenarčič are honored for their outstanding research.

Prof. Teresa Pellegrino from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, Italy, and Dr. Zala Lenarčič from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, have been awarded the Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship Program 2025 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" and prize money of 20,000 euros for the senior award and 10,000 euros for the junior award.

The Senior Award goes to Professor Teresa Pellegrino, Senior Researcher Principal Investigator at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Tenured Team Leader of the research group "Nanomaterials for Biomedical Applications" at IIT. Teresa Pellegrino is an internationally recognized expert in nanoparticles and biomedical applications. A chemist by training, she held a Marie Curie fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and another at UC Berkeley, USA, before completing her PhD in Italy. She then held positions at the National Nanotechnology Lab in Lecce, Italy, and at the Nanoscience Institute of the National Research Council (CNR), before joining the IIT in 2014. Her research interests focus on the development of inorganic nanostructures for drug delivery, magnetic hyperthermia, photothermal treatment and radiotherapy. For her research at the interface of materials science and nanomedicine, she has received three ERC grants and three investigator grants from the Italian AIRC Foundation for Cancer Research. She has also coordinated the European research project Magnifyco.

Teresa Pellegrino has been working successfully for many years with CUI researchers Prof. Nadja Bigall from the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Prof. Wolfgang Parak from the Institute of Nanostructure and Solid State Physics at the University of Hamburg. An application focusing on magnetic nanodevices is now being planned.

Deepen the German Italian scientific partnership

"I warmly congratulate Teresa and am very much looking forward to the joint research, which will not only deepen the German Italian scientific partnership, but also holds great potential for outstanding research results," says Nadja Bigall. "Our collaboration started more than 20 years ago," adds Wolfgang Parak. "Teresa has always been a driving force and has gone her own extraordinary way. I would also like to congratulate her most-heartedly on this award".

Teresa Pellegrino: “I am enthusiastic and honored to have been selected as one of the recipients of the 2025 Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship in recognition of my scientific contributions. This opportunity allows me to strengthen collaborations with my esteemed colleagues at the CUI Cluster of Excellence, with whom I have shared memorable moments throughout my scientific journey. Through this visiting professorship, I look forward to reconnecting with them, make new collaborations and broaden our joint efforts to explore new research directions. I am also proud to be selected for this professorship in memory of Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, a pioneering and resilient figure in nanotechnology and a role model for women in science. As a chemist working at the intersection of materials science and nanomedicine, I hope to honor her inheritance—as well as that of the remarkable scientists who have received this award in previous years—by serving as a mentor to the next generation of women and men in STEM.”

The Junior Award goes to Dr Zala Lenarčič. A physicist by training, Dr Lenarčić completed her PhD at the University of Ljubljana and then embarked on a career with postdoctoral positions at the University of Cologne and UC Berkeley, which led to her current position as a permanent research group leader at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. Her research focuses on non-equilibrium phenomena in correlated quantum systems and their technological applications. In particular, she wants to understand how the interplay of nonequilibrium driving and dissipation can make the remarkable properties of quantum many-particle systems more robust to perturbations. In the field of ultrafast laser-excited dynamics in solids, she has pioneered a theoretical understanding of dynamical processes, for example with her work on excitons in quantum materials

Zala Lenarčič has received several awards and research grants, including an ERC Starting Grant. As a recognized expert, she is frequently invited to major international conferences. The physicist is also very active in science communication and has given a TEDx talk entitled "Balancing the Unstable: From Cycling to Controlling Quantum Matter".

Quantum physics work with great importance for CUI

"I warmly congratulate Dr Lenarčič," says Martin Eckstein, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Hamburg and Principal Investigator of CUI. "She is an outstanding researcher in the field of nonequilibrium quantum physics. With important innovative contributions to both fundamental quantum models and real materials, her work is of great importance to CUI. I am looking forward to working with her during her stay in Hamburg."

Zala Lenarčič: “Hamburg’s research environment is a special place on my scientific map: from where I got the first acknowledgement in a paper, the first citation, and the first invited talk - all as a young PhD student. Years later, it was also where I completed my first interview for a full professorship. Being awarded the Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship and getting the opportunity to connect and do research within one of the world’s leading centers for non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is something I would have only dreamed of back then as a PhD student. I am deeply honored and would also like to pay tribute to the enduring legacy of Prof. Dresselhaus — a source of inspiration for our community’s work on transport and optical properties of what we now call quantum materials, and a role model for generations of scientists to come.”