Newly Appointed
Max Lein was appointed Professor for Mathematical Physics, (pay scale group W2) at the Faculty of Science.
After studying physics and gaining his doctorate in mathematics at the Technical University of Munich, he held several post-doctoral positions, initially at the universities of Tübingen and Kyushu (Japan). He then conducted research as a Fields Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Fields Institute. In 2015, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the interdisciplinary research institute WPI-AIMR at the University of Tohoku (Japan) and promoted to Associate Professor in 2018. Before taking up his professorship in Potsdam, he worked in the data analysis and modeling team at the Austrian company EV Group GmbH, which manufactures wafer bonding and nanoimprint lithography machines for the semiconductor industry, among other things.
His research is based on a combination of theoretical physics and applied mathematics. Many problems are motivated by solid-state physics, for example how periodic structures and symmetries affect the propagation of classical waves.
Holger Lange was appointed Professor for “Experimental Physics of Light-Matter Interaction” (pay scale group W2) at the Faculty of Science.
Previously, he was an independent research group leader at the Center for Ultrafast Imaging at the University of Hamburg. He started his higher education journey as a student of physics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Trinity College Dublin before moving on to the Technische Universität Berlin for his doctorate. He then conducted research at the Department of Physics at Columbia University in New York (USA).
Holger Lange's current research focuses on the dynamics of excited electrons in nanoparticles, specifically in two classes of materials. On the one hand, he researches metal nanoparticles, which are also a focus of the new Collaborative Research Center 1636 “Elementary Processes of Light-Driven Reactions at Nanoscale Metals”. On the other hand, he is interested in semiconductor nanoparticles, the “quantum dots” honored with the Nobel Prize last year, as a building block for efficient light emission.
Katja Frieler was appointed Professor for Impacts of Climate Change (pay scale group W3) at the Faculty of Science.
After studying mathematics at the University of Bielefeld, she worked as a Ph.D. student at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) on improving our understanding of polar stratospheric ozone losses. In 2006, Katja Frieler completed her doctorate at the University of Potsdam before she accepted a postdoc position at the Institute for Biometry and Clinical Epidemiology at the Charité – University Medicine Berlin. Since 2008 she has been working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research where she has been leading the department on transformation pathways together with Prof. Elmar Kriegler since 2019.
Her research is dedicated to the impacts of extreme weather events and how these impacts have already changed because of climate change and socio-economic development (impact attribution) and are expected to change in the future.
