2021

At its meeting of 8 and 9 December 2021 and upon application of Joël Mesot, President of ETH Zurich, the ETH Board appointed Professor Tae-​​Lim Choi (*1977), currently Full Professor at Seoul National University, South Korea, as Full Professor of Polymer Chemistry in the Department of Materials.

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.

The group of Polymeric Materials has developed a simple way to regulate both dispersity and sequence in highly complex multiblock copolymers and the results have been published in Nature Chemistry.

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".

In their latest paper published on Nature Communications, researchers from the Soft and Living Materials group and their collaborators design a protein droplet system that is as active and as concentrated as the cytoplasm. 

A collaboration between researchers at the ETH Zurich Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology and Empa has shown that Pd-based metallic glass demonstrates thrombogenic resistance that is substantially higher than that of state-of-the-art Ti64. With its superior mechanical properties, the Pd-based glass is particularly interesting for blood-contacting, load-bearing medical devices. The results are presented in Advanced Functional Materials.

The group of Polymeric Materials, in collaboration with the group of Soft and Living Materials, have developed a low-energy nanoemulsion method to produce nanoparticles with various morphologies.

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.

In the latest work published on Small, researchers from the Soft and Living Materials group, inspired by living organisms, demonstrate a simple method to dramatically increase the refractive index of commercial polymers. 

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.

Materials have such a profound impact on humanity that we name entire historical ages after them.

Soft magnetic carpets, created at Complex Materials lab, can transport heavy objects and liquids amphibiously, like cilia, and sort this cargo by size and shape.

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.

The group of Prof. Lucio Isa has pioneered the fabrication of reconfigurable artificial microswimmers incorporating soft thermoresponsive polymers. The particles, powered by AC electric fields, use light-induced temperature differences to change shape and dielectric properties, in order to adapt their propulsion. The work was possible thanks to a collaboration with D-MATL’s Prof. Martin Kröger and with the group of Prof. Angel Alegria CFM (Spain) via the EUSMI network.

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.