Archived Awards and Honors

The John Atanasoff Award, named after the creator of the first electronic computer - the famous scholar of Bulgarian descent, John Atanasoff, was first awarded in 2003 in support of the personal achievements of young Bulgarian researchers working in the fields of informatics and information technology. Marin Bukov, group leader at MPI-PKS, is among this year's awardees ”for his outstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence applied to quantum technologies, and for his role in the development of efficient innovative research and education tools used worldwide”. Congratulations, Marin!

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced early-career top researchers across Europe who will receive a starting grant. The prestigious grants enable the best young researchers in Europe to build their own teams and to conduct pioneering research across all disciplines. This year, two of these grants were awarded to research group leaders at the MPI-PKS: Marin Bukov for his proposal "Nonequilibrium Many Body Control of Quantum Simulators" and Ricard Alert for his proposal "The Spectrum of Fluctuations in Living Matter". Congratulations!!

On July 11, 2023, Prof. Jörg Schmalian from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology received the "Physik-Preis Dresden 2023" (Dresden Physics Prize), jointly awarded by the TU Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS). The "Physik-Preis Dresden" has been established, with a generous donation by Prof. Peter Fulde, to promote cooperation between the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Faculty of Physics of TU Dresden. It is geared towards outstanding researchers whose research is of particular interest to scientists in Dresden. This year's recipient, Prof. Jörg Schmalian, fits this condition perfectly. Jörg Schmalian studied physics in Leipzig and Merseburg and graduated from the Technische Hochschule Merseburg in 1990. The German reunification made it possible for him to obtain a doctorate in physics in 1993 from Freie Universität Berlin under the supervision of Karl Bennemann. He stayed at FU Berlin as a postdoc before joining the group of David Pines at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. In 1999, Jörg Schmalian moved back to Europe and became a fellow of St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford. In the same year, he accepted an offer for a tenure-track faculty position at Iowa State University, in connection with a researcher position at Ames National Lab. Jörg Schmalian quickly moved up through the ranks to become full professor in 2007. In 2011, he moved to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology as a professor. Currently, he is the Dean of the Faculty of Physics of KIT. Jörg Schmalian has been a visiting professor at Royal Holloway University, University of Paris Diderot, and Stanford University. He has received multiple honors, among them a fellowship of the American Physical Society and the 2022 John Bardeen Prize for Theory of Superconductivity. Jörg Schmalian is an internationally highly visible theoretical physicist with a broad range of interests. He has published over 200 research papers with over 10.000 citations. Jörg Schmalian started to work on strongly correlated electrons and superconductivity during his doctoral studies, at that time with a focus on cuprate high-temperature superconductors. He later made significant contributions to superconductivity and other ordering phenomena in iron-based and organic compounds as well as more generally on the physics of coupled order parameters. It is characteristic for Jörg Schmalian's work that he has both established conceptual foundations and modeled and predicted specific phenomena, working close to experiments. Jörg Schmalian's papers on spin-fluctuation-mediated superconductivity and on nematic order have become standard references in these fields. Moreover, Jörg Schmalian's works on quantum criticality and transport in graphene have strongly advanced the hydrodynamics of electron liquids. They were essential for identifying graphene as a readily available system in which many aspects of hydrodynamical transport can be studied experimentally. Last but not least, Jörg Schmalian has made significant contributions to the field of disordered systems. He has worked on electronic glasses and disordered magnets as well as on novel superconducting phases in models with strong disorder. Jörg Schmalian has multiple connections to Dresden, not only to theoretical physics groups at MPI-PKS and TUD. There is also strong overlap with experimental work done at IFW Dresden, at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, and by Andrew Mackenzie's group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. This is exemplified by a new paper on strontium ruthenate with Jörg Schmalian and Andrew Mackenzie as two of the authors. The Physik-Preis Dresden for the year 2023 honors Jörg Schmalian as an outstanding theoretical condensed-matter physicist with strong connections to Dresden and will hopefully help to strengthen these connections further.

Frank Jülicher shares the inaugural 2023 IUPAP Medal for the Physics of Life

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) has awarded the 2023 IUPAP Medal for the Physics of Life jointly to John J. Hopfield and to Frank Jülicher, director at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. The citation reads “For his key contributions to biological active matter physics, shedding light on the physical mechanisms that underlie cellular processes, including cooperative molecular motors; hearing; flagellar beat; active gels, fluids, and droplets; the active cell cortex; tissue growth and patterning; protein phase separation in cells; and self-organization of active surfaces.”
The IUPAP Medal for the Physics of Life is a new award of the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), presented by its C6 Commission on Biological Physics every three years, at the IUPAP International Conference on Biological Physics (ICBP). The Award, consisting of a gilded medal and a certificate, recognizes outstanding achievements in Biological Physics, regardless of the country where the research has been done, the age, or the employment status of the nominee.
Congratulations, Frank!

Ricard Alert receives the IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize in Biological Physics (C6) 2023

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) has awarded the 2023 Early Career Prize 2023 in Biological Physics to Ricard Alert, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Center for Systems Biology Dresden for "revealing how new phenomena in active matter underlie a wide range of biological processes, from the spreading of epithelial tissues, to turbulent-like flows in cytoskeletal networks, to the formation of fruiting bodies in bacterial colonies".
The IUPAP C6 Early Career Scientist Prize recognizes exceptional achievements of scientists in the field of Biological Physics at a relatively early stage of their career. The recipients must be no more than eight years past the award of their PhDs (excluding career interruptions), and they are expected to have demonstrated significant scientific achievements and display exceptional promise for future achievements in Biological Physics.
Congratulations, Ricard!