DCF News

Prakhar Godara is our newest PhD. He successfully defended his dissertation "Resource bounded agency in public good games" today. Stephan Herminghaus, who also supervised the thesis, presented him with his graduation cap. The DCF team congratulates him cordially!

On the occasion of the retirement of our long-time head of the department, Prof. Stephan Herminghaus, the scientific symposium "Complex Fluids and Beyond" was organized. Current and former group leaders of the department, who now hold professorships worldwide, reported on their current research. In the audience were many alumni who met again after many years with great pleasure. more

This year, after the Corona break, a retreat of the Institute's scientists at Ludwigstein Castle near Witzenhausen was finally possible again. The lively scientific exchange was a very good preparation for the visit of the advisory board at the end of April, although the hygiene concept prevented a complete occupancy of the castle.

With a small ceremony today, the main building of our institute was renamed "Herminghaus Building" after the head of our department. The idea came from the acting managing director Prof. Ramin Golestanian. So now we also have the "Bodenschatz Building" and the "Geisel Building" to thank the three scientists for their intensive and long lasting efforts in building up the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization.

Today Olinka Ramirez Soto defended her dissertation entitled "Impact of compositional gradients on the dynamics of solid-liquid-vapor contact lines". After the exam she was happy together with Stefan Karpitschka, who supervised her as group leader, when handing over the PhD hat. We congratulate her cordially!

On November 2021, Peter Keim will start setting up an independent Heisenberg group, which will be hosted by our department. Previously, he was group leader at the University of Konstanz. In his research projects he investigates vitrification, topological phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking beyond equilibrium. Welcome to the crowd!

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has awarded Dr. Youchuang Chao a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers. Youchuang is doing his PostDoc research in Stefan Karpitschka’s group “Interfaces of complex fluids” and is studying the interaction between surface forces, phase separation, and transport processes. This is an interdisciplinary problem of soft matter, physical chemistry and fluid physics that occurs in many technological applications and may also contribute toward understanding liquid-liquid phase separation in cell biology. With the award, his project is funded for a time period of up to 2 years.