Prof. Claudia Backes, University of Heidelberg
2019 Materials Research Prize for Young Investigators
Dr. Backes made seminal contributions to the fabrication of low-dimensional materials. She invented a powerful processing technique to separate the layers of three-dimensional organic and inorganic materials into free-floating sheets, which is transforming the study of two two-dimensional materials.
Biography
Dr. Backes has obtained her Ph.D with honors in 2011 from the University of Erlangen, Germany. From 2011 to 2012, she supported the Erlangen Cluster of Excellence "Engineering of Advanced Materials" as deputy executive director and scientific coordinator. She received a fellowship grant from the German Research Foundation in 2012 and moved to Jonathan Coleman’s group at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. In 2015, she returned to Germany and started her independent research at the Chair of Applied Physical Chemistry at Heidelberg University. In 2016, she was awarded with the prestigious Emmy Noether funding from the German Research Foundation to establish her own research group at the University of Heidelberg.
Research Summary
Dr. Backes' work in the Layered Nanomaterials Group is focused on exploiting liquid-exfoliated layered, two-dimensional nanomaterials as versatile building blocks for further solution processing and supramolecular chemistry. These include, for example, transition metal dichalcogenides like MoS2 or WSe2 and III-VI semiconductors like GaS. Dr. Backes applies a number of spectroscopic and microscopic techniques to both understand and tune the properties of a broad variety of layered materials. Very similar to graphene, these layered materials exhibit distinct physical and electronic properties from their bulk counterparts when exfoliated down to mono- or few-layered species. Size control therefore offers equally exciting possibilities to tailor materials for specific needs as surface modification and functionalisation.