News Archive

Congratulations to Alberto for winning the prize for his poster "solid_dmft: Grey-​boxing the description of strongly correlated materials" on the occasion of the 20-​years-of Nanosience celebration.

Each year the world's largest association in magnetism – the Division of Magnetism of the German Physical Society (DPG) awards the INNOMAG Prize for the best dissertation. This year it goes deep into the quantum world where magnetism competes with other correlated states.

Athina Anastasaki, Head of Polymeric Materials, receives the 2024 Macromolecular Rapid Communications Junior Researcher Award in the fields of chemistry, physics and application of polymer systems.

Athina Anastasaki, Head of Polymeric Materials, receives the 2024 Werner Prize for outstanding research in the field of chemistry.

Athina Anastasaki, Head of the Laboratory of Polymeric Materials, received the EuChemS Lecture Award in recognition of her major achievements, and her outsanding research profile on the field of polymer chemistry.

Frans Spaepen was bestowed with an honorary doctorate at the ETH Day in 2020. Because this celebration only occurred online during the Corona pandemic, we now have organized a one-day symposium to celebrate the event. The symposium will end with the Staudinger-Durrer Lecture, presented by Prof. Spaepen, and his honoring with the Staudinger-Durrer Prize by the rector of ETH Zurich, Prof. Günther Dissertori.

Dr. Sara Morgenthaler, study coordnator and lecturer, wins the Golden Owl 2023 awarded by VSETH, for excellent teaching. Congratulations!

Carla Fernandez-Rico, an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Soft and Living Materials, and Complex Materials, has been selected among six other talented scientists, as the 2023 winner of the Women Interactive Materials Award.

After the Corona pandemic, people at LMPT finally had the opportunity to present their accumulated results at international conferences over the Summer and Fall 2023. The results were well received by the international community.

Prof. em. ETH Dr. Nicholas D. Spencer and Prof. Antonella Rossi (University of Cagliari, I) have both won the Tribochemistry Award of the Japanese Society of Tribologists (JAST). The awardees are renowned for their research in tribochemistry over a period spanning three decades. The researchers collaborated at the Laboratory for Surface Science and Technology in the Department of Materials, ETH Zurich.

The laureate of the 2023 Lise Meitner Award is Professor Nicola Spaldin, who is awarded for “Fundamental theoretical contributions and discoveries in the field of multiferroics”.

The 18th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 22 June 2023 at ETH Zentrum. The Department of Materials was again very successfully represented this year. It is therefore not surprising that several of the awards were given to members of the D-​MATL.

Athina Anastasaki, Head of the Laboratory of Polymeric Materials, has been selected as one of the Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12, which recognizes young rising stars in chemistry who are not afraid of taking risk in the early stages of their career.

Laura Heyderman, who leads the Mesoscopic Systems Group at PSI and ETH Zurich, has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Her nomination recognises almost 30 years of research into magnetic materials and magnetism on the nanoscale, most notably, in the field of artificial spin ice.

Athina Anastasaki, Head of the Laboratory of Polymeric Materials, wins the 2023 ACS Macroletters/Biomacromolecules/Macromolecules Young Investigator Award which seeks to recognize two individuals, early in their careers (under 40), who have had a major impact on the field of polymer science.

This year, the expert jury immediately reached a unanimous decision: from among the five inventions nominated for the Spark Award 2023, the whole panel chose the novel corrosion protection developed by researchers from the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials.

Finally again – a Master’s degree graduation ceremony without special restrictions. It was wonderful to see the smiles of our 37 graduates and celebrate together with their families and friends!

Thomas Weber, the head of the X-ray platform at D-MATL, receives the Will-Kleber Commemorative Coin from the German Society for Crystallography.

Manfred Fiebig and his group visualize ferroic states with the help of non-linear laser optics. Now the physicist and materials scientist is being honoured with the Stern-Gerlach Medal of the German Physical Society, their highest distinction in Experimental Physics.

Best Paper Prize 2022 - Martin Kröger (Computational Polymer Physics) receives award from the Journal of Physics A - Mathematical and Theoretical.

The 16th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on September 1st, 2022. The D-​MATL was again successfully represented this year, with several high-​​class talks and poster presentations. Many of the awards went to members of D-​MATL.

Dr. Sayantika Bhowal, postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Materials Theory group (D-​MATL), has been selected as one of the winners for the IXS2022 Early Career Scientist Awards. 

Nicola Spaldin, Professor of Materials Theory at the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich is pioneering the development of a new class of materials known as multiferroics. These could facilitate ground-breaking microelectronics applications, such as the building of ultra-fast data repositories or supersensitive sensors.

The 2022 EPS Condensed Matter Division (CMD) Europhysics Prize has been awarded to Prof. Agnès Barthélémy and Dr. Manuel Bibes (CNRS/Thales laboratory of University Paris-Saclay), Prof. Ramamoorthy Ramesh (UC Berkeley) and Prof. Nicola Spaldin (ETH Zurich) for seminal contributions to the physics and applications of multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials.

Professor Athina Anastasaki, head of the laboratory of polymeric materials, wins the 2022 Young Investigator PMSE Award (by the ACS) which seeks to recognize those early career scientists who have had a significant impact on the field of polymer science and engineering.

The STLE International Award is the highest technical honor of the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers (USA) and bestows lifetime honorary membership on the recipient. It is given in recognition of the recipient's outstanding contributions in tribology, lubrication engineering or allied fields. The award will be presented at the STLE Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida in May.

The Master’s degree graduation ceremony 2022 in Materials took place on January 14, 2022. It was great to celebrate the graduates together with a limited number of guests in person at ETH Zürich.

The French Academy of Sciences have elected 16 new foreign associates. The foreign associates contribute to the international reputation of the Academy and their number cannot go beyond 150.

At its meeting of 8 and 9 December 2021 and upon application of Joël Mesot, President of ETH Zurich, the ETH Board appointed Dr Rolf Erni (*1974), currently Lecturer in the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich and Head of the Electron Microscopy Center at Empa, as Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich.

Professor Athina Anastasaki, head of the laboratory of polymeric materials, wins the Golden Owl 2021 awarded by VSETH, for excellent teaching. Congratulations!

Claudia Sigel was awarded for her idea of a platform on which technical and administrative staff could offer each other internal continuing education courses.

On 5 November, Manfred Fiebig became a corresponding member of the "Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz". The academy is an interregionally oriented association of personalities from the fields of science, literature and music. It is a place of dialogue that focuses on interdisciplinary exchange.

Prof. Xu has made important contributions to the field of flexible electronics.  Most recently, he invented a wearable ultrasonic technology that allows noninvasive monitoring of tissue far below the skin surface. He also developed new growth methods for materials used in flexible high-performance electronics.

The Materials Theory group is very pleased to announce that Veronica Michel receives this award for her Master's thesis "Interplay between Ferroelectricity and Metallicity in BaTiO₃".

Manfred Fiebig received the prize for pioneering nonlinear optical spectroscopy studies that led to a fundamental understanding of the emergence and coupling of electric and magnetic orders at the level of domains and domain walls. The prize will be awarded at the 2022 March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago.

Professor Athina Anastasaki, head of the laboratory of Polymeric Materials, has been appointed as an Associate Editor for Polymer Chemistry, a Royal Society of Chemistry Journal.

Dr. Alexandra Bayles, ETH fellow in the group of Soft Materials, was awarded the ECIS-Polymers Award for young scientist to acknowledge top level scientific activity of young researchers in the field of polymer physics, chemistry, or technology.

The Colloid & Interface Science Award, sponsored by Solvay, is granted to a European scientist for original scientific work of outstanding quality, described in one or several publications, patents or other documents made public in the previous five years.

Because of the Covid pandemic the Master’s degree graduation ceremony 2020 at D-MATL was postponed until June 2021, hoping that it would be possible to organize a ceremony in person rather than remotely. Unfortunately, it wasn’t yet possible to invite any guests, but the graduates were received at ETH Zürich for the ceremony.

The 16th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 14 & 15 June 2021. The D-​MATL was again successfully represented this year, with several high-​class talks and poster presentations. Many of the awards went to members of D-​MATL.

Can Onur Avci, Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, Spain, receives the Prize for outstanding contributions to understand current-induced spin-orbit torques and electrical control of the magnetization in magnetic insulators, and for the discovery of unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance.

Nicola Spaldin receives the Award and Medal for pioneering contributions to the fundamental and applied science of magnetic and ferroelectric materials, particularly multiferroics.

Jan Vermant receives the award for advancing the science of interfacial rheology through the development of new measurement techniques and methods of analysis and for bringing new understanding to the rheology of dispersions through microstructural interpretation of rheological data. His development of superposition rheometry has created a new approach to studying microstructure during nonlinear flows.

Prof. Jörg F. Löffler has been selected to the class of 2021 MRS Fellows for his pioneering contributions to novel metallic materials design.

The Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences SATW has taken on 14 full individual members. These people have a considerable track record in technical sciences.

The Swiss National Science Foundation has appointed Manfred Fiebig as new member of the National Research Council to represent the Mathematics, Natural Engineering and Sciences Division from 1 April 2021.

The European Commission has appointed five eminent scientists as new members of the governing body of the European Research Council (ERC), the Scientific Council, among them, Nicola Spaldin.

Seven ETH researchers can look forward to generous funding for their projects: the European Research Council (ERC) has approved a total amount of around 15 million Swiss francs. Prof. Luico Isa, head of Soft Materials and Interfaces, is one of those researchers.

Prof. Frans A. Spaepen has been appointed honorary doctorate of ETH Zurich for his outstanding contribution to the basic understanding of the structure and properties of melts and amorphous materials, and his significant impact on materials science and applied physics.

Congratulations to Prof. Nicola Spaldin, this year’s winner of the Golden Owl at the D-​MATL. Nicola Spaldin, head of the Materials Theory group, receives the award for her excellent teaching.

Athina Anastasaki, head of Polymeric Materials has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant worth of 1.5 Million. This will allow her group to develop depolymerization strategies that are based on controlled radical polymerization.

The 15th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 01 & 02 July 2020. The D-MATL was extremely (!!) successfully represented this year, with several high-class talks and poster presentations. It is therefore not surprising that many of our awards went to members of D-MATL.

Martina Cihova, currently postdoc at the Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology (LMPT), has been awarded with an Acta Student Award for her primary contribution to the Acta Biomaterialia manuscript "The role of zinc in the biocorrosion behavior of resorbable Mg–Zn–Ca alloys". The work resulted from another great collaboration between LMPT, the Medical University of Graz, and Empa Dübendorf.

Claire Donnelly, former PhD student and Postdoc at the Laboratory for Mesoscopic Systems of Prof. L. Heyderman, is the winner of the 2020 Young Scientist Award of the European Magnetism Association (EMA) “For advances in the experimental characterization of spin textures and their dynamics in three dimensions with X-ray techniques.”

Athina Anastasaki, head of the polymeric materials laboratory, has been awarded the 2020 Hanwha-Total IUPAC Young Scientist Award together with Changle Chen. The Hanwha-Total IUPAC Young Scientist Award (formerly Samsung-Total Petrochemicals – IUPAC Young Scientists Award) is dedicated to outstanding young scientists (not older than 40 years) and is sponsored by a grant from the aforementioned company.

Congratulations to Prof. Lucio Isa, this year’s winner of the Golden Owl at the D-MATL. Lucio Isa, head of the Soft Materials and Interfaces group, has been receiving outstanding student feedback for his teaching on the Master’s level since many years.

We are very proud to announce that Tobias Esswein, PhD student of the Materials Theory group, has been awarded the IBM Research Forschungspreis for his excellent Master Thesis "Exploring Ferroelectric Quantum Criticality and Superconductivity in KTaO₃".

At this year’s Master’s degree graduation ceremony 26 graduates received their diploma. We congratulate all the graduates and wish them the best for their future career! In addition, the following four students were awarded with prizes for their outstanding achievements.

Nicola Spaldin, head of Materials Theory group, has been awarded the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist for her outstanding research into multiferroic materials. Her work has laid the foundations for new ultrafast and energy-efficient data storage technologies.

Professor Nicholas D. Spencer is the latest winner of the Tribology Gold Medal, which will be awarded to him in November at a special ceremony in the British Embassy in Berne.

The 14th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 03 July 2019 at ETH Zentrum. The Department of Materials was very successfully represented this year with various high-class talks and poster presentations. It is therefore not surprising that many of the awards were given to members of the D-MATL.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of IUPAC and the International Year of the Periodic Table, IUPAC and IYCN announce the creation of a Periodic Table of Younger Chemists (40 years of age or younger). Athina Anastasaki (Head of Laboratory of Polymeric Materials) has been selected to represent Curium, an element named after Marie and Pierre Curie. Athina was selected for her outstanding contributions in advancing interdisciplinary and international collaboration in chemistry research.

In commemoration of the scientific achievements of Karl Weissenberg, performed in several European countries, the European Society of Rheology (ESR) decided in 1997 to create a “Weissenberg Award” for outstanding, long-term achievements in the field of rheology. Eligible are rheologists whose centre of scientific activities lies in Europe. The award is bestowed biannually. The 2019 Weissenberg Award recipient is Jan Vermant, head of the Soft Materials Group at the Deparment of Materials.

Alexander Hampel, PhD student at the Materials Theory group, has been selected to receive an Ovshinsky Student Travel Award for the 2019 March American Physical Society (APS) Meeting in Bosto

Dr. Awadhesh Narayan has been selected for a DMP Post-Doctoral Travel Award for the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston.

Three researchers from the ETH Domain, including professor Nicola Spaldin, head of the Materials Theory group, and a scientist from Stockholm University have received an ERC Synergy Grant of EUR 13.9 million.

The ETH Zurich’s student association (VSETH) has selected Pietro Gambardella, head of Magnetism and Interface Physics, as a recipient of the "Goldene Eule".

In August 2018, Claire Donnelly was awarded the SPS Award in Computational Physics, sponsored by COMSOL, and the Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award. We congratulate her on these awards as well as for two awards earlier on in the year: the ETH Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis and the American Physical Society Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award, recognizing doctoral thesis research of exceptional quality and importance.

The 13th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 26 June 2018 at ETH Hönggerberg. Over 220 participants joined the symposium to discuss the latest achievements of early-career researchers in Materials and Processes from ETH Zurich, PSI and EMPA. Researchers of our Department were among the finalists and price winners.

Prof. Nicholas Spencer was named Fellow of the (US) Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, for his significant impact on the field of tribology and lubrication engineering.

At the 2018 Nagoya meeting, Dieter Schlüter was awarded the International Award 2017 of the Society of Polymer Science Japan for his "Pioneering Studies of 1D Nanoobject Polymers and the Discovery of Synthetic 2D Polymers".

Claire Donnelly, PhD student at the Mesoscopic Systems group, has been awarded the 2018 Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award in Experimental Condensed Matter or Materials Physics from the American Physical Society. The award recognises doctoral thesis research of exceptional quality and importance. This prize is for her dissertation on "Hard X-ray Tomgraphy of Three Dimensional Magnetic Structures".

The ETH Zurich’s student association (VSETH) has selected Markus Niederberger, head of the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials, as a recipient of the "Goldene Eule".

The Materials Research Society has chosen Prof. Nicola Spaldin, Head of the Materials Theory group, to receive the Mid-Career Researcher Award for "her new theoretical framework describing multiferroics and service to the materials community" .

Prof. Tian has pioneered new chemical reactivity in inorganic nanowires to gain control of their morphology and make them biocompatible. This work has enabled new bioelectric measurements within cells.

The work by Dr. Edmondo M. Benetti on highly-confined controlled radical polymerizations, presented at the Controlled Radical Polymerization Session of the 254th American Chemical Society National Meeting (20-25th September 2017, Washington DC) was identified as the "Best Presentation" of the symposium.

Christian Mathis, former PhD student at Surface Science and Technology, was awarded the "KlarText – Prize for Science Communication". The price awards young scientists who have written a very good doctoral thesis and have summirized their results in an article that is generally comprehensible, logically structured and exiting.

We are delighted that Dr. Chiara Gattinoni, post-doctoral researcher at the Materials Therory group, is amongst the winners of the EPSRC Best Use of ARCHER competition, which was run by EPCC on behalf of ARCHER. 

Emeritus Professor Ulrich W. Suter was conferred the Honorary Citizen Award of Singapore by the President of Singapore, Mr Tony Tan, for his contributions to developing Singapore into a vibrant research and development hub.

We are happy to announce that our Master student Andriani Keliri has been granted the INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowship. The INSPIRE fellowships aim to empower excellent female students to conduct their Master's thesis research in a laboratory belonging to the NCCR MARVEL on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials.

The annual MaP Graduate Symposium on 22 June 2017 brought together 240 researchers, students and faculty from ETH Zurich, Empa, PSI and IBM Research. Three researchers of our Department have received an award.

Multiferroics couple magnetic and electric properties in unique ways. By directing his research at ETH Zurich on the domain walls that separate regions with a different orientation of magnetic and electric order in multiferroics, Dennis Meier discovered a realm of novel magneto-electronic functionalities. For this discovery, he received the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society.

The Materials Research Prize for Young Investigators is newly established in order to emphasize the fundamental role young researchers play in advancing materials science, spanning fundamental and applied research. It is endowed by the ETH Department of Materials and will be awarded biannually.

Alessandro Ofner, doctoral student in the Complex Materials group, presented a video-loop showing massive multichannel microencapsulation.

Nicola Spaldin, professor at Materials Theory (D-MATL), has been awarded a fellowship granted by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. The admission to the Society will take place at a formal admissions day ceremony on Friday July 14, 2017.

The Swiss Physical Society Prize 2017, sponsored by ABB, will be awarded to Sinead M. Griffin, former PhD student of the Materials Theory group, for her "Outstanding computational physics research from cosmic string formation to multiferroics."

The Editorial Board for the journal Materials Horizons of the Royal Society of Chemistry has chosen Markus Niederberger, Multifunctional Materials, among others as outstanding reviewer in 2016 based on the number, timeliness and quality of reports completed.

Jan Vermant, Soft Materials, has been nominated as Outstanding Reviewer for the journal Soft Matter of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The reviewers have been chosen based on the number, timeliness and quality of the reports completed over the last 12 months.

ETH Professor Nicola Spaldin will today be honoured for her revolutionary research in the field of materials science. In Paris, she is set to receive the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award for Europe, which carries prize money of 100,000 euros.

The ETH Board awarded the title of Professor to Dr. Claude Ederer (*1972), currently Senior Scientist and Lecturer at ETH Zurich, as Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich. Claude Ederer is a globally recognised expert in the field of materials theory of ferroic systems. Before joining ETH Zurich in 2012, he worked at a number of renowned universities in the United States and Ireland. Congratulations!

Dr. Hanumantha Rao Vutukuri, postdoc in the Soft Materials group, has obtained a Marie Curie Fellowship for his work on active colloidal systems. Roa will be focussing on how to use active particles to build new materials (in a collaboration with Caltech), and try to undertsand collective phenomena is such sytems.

With great pleasure we announce that Dr. Chiara Gattinoni, postdoctoral researcher at Materials Theory, has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship for her work on "Properties across dimensions: an atomistic computational study of bismuth ferrite surfaces and nanocrystals". Dr. Gattinoni will focus on the surface- and nano-science of bismuth ferrite with an eye towards applications in catalysis and photovoltaics.

The ETH Zurich’s student association (VSETH) has selected Walter R. Caseri, titular professor at the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials, as a recipient of the “Goldene Eule”.

Prof. Nicola Spaldin, Chair of Materials Theory, has been selected as the 2017 L’Oréal-UNESCO “For Women in Science” Laureate for Europe. This award recognizes her groundbreaking multidisciplinary work predicting, describing and creating new materials that have switchable magnetic and ferroelectric properties.

Jörg F. Löffler has been awarded the DGM "Breakthrough" Prize 2016 of the German Society of Materials. This award is "bestowed on an excellent scientist in the middle of his/her research career for outstanding scientific achievements which represent a breakthrough in materials science and/or for initiating a new research field".

Prof. Jan Vermant was awarded the 2016 Onsager Professorship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and received the Onsager medal on September 26 th in Trondheim. Prof Vermant was also elected as a fellow of the Society of Rheology (US), class of 2016.

The Department is proud to announce that Can Onur Avci (Magnetism and Interface Physics), Max Jonathan Kory (Polymer Chemistry), Marco Schweizer (Polymer Physics) and Stef Smeets (Crystallography) will be awarded the ETH Medal 2016 for their outstanding doctoral theses.

PhD Rafael Schmitt received the European Materials Research Society Young Scientist Award at the 2016 EMRS for his fundamental work entitled "Direct Evidence of Oxygen Vacancies Role for Resistive Switching in Ceria-based Oxides to Modulate Information Bits".

Jan Van den Broek was awarded with the 2nd Prize of the "Zuger Wissenschaftspreis" for his thesis "All Solid State Li-Ion Batteries Based on Garnet-type Fast Li-ion Conductors".

Prof. Laura Heyderman was presented with a certificate acknowledging her Beller Lectureship at the APS March Meeting 2016 by Suzanne te Velthuis, Chair of the APS Topical Group on Magnetism and its Applications (GMAG).