On 24 October 2023, the Dresdner Promotionspreis Physik (Dresden Doctoral Prize in Physics) 2023 was awarded to Dr Stefanie Todt and Dr Anton Kirch. During the Physics Colloquium at TUD-Dresden University of Technology, the two talented scientists were honoured with the prize for their outstanding dissertations. After a welcoming address by the Dean of the Faculty of Physics, Prof Carsten Timm, the Chairman of the Prize Committee, Prof Roland Ketzmerick, gave the laudatory speech for the prize winners. Both Anton Kirch and Stefanie Todt were connected online to the event. While Anton Kirch gave a short scientific talk about his award-winning research work, Stefanie Todt's contribution was postponed to a later date.

Dr. Kirch, who is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Umeå University in Sweden, is an outstanding experimental physicist with an impressive track record in the field of organic light-emitting diodes. In his dissertation at the Institute of Applied Physics, entitled "Charge-carrier dynamics in organic LEDs", he addressed the physical limits and application opportunities of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and presented design criteria to mitigate previous limitations of the technology. He thus made significant contributions to charge carrier dynamics in organic layers with relevance from basic research to technological developments. For Anton Kirch, this award “recognizes the work of our institute. Science at IAPP is a team effort, for which I am grateful to my colleagues and my supervisor Sebastian Reineke. Thanks to the stimulating and trusting atmosphere, great group leaders and professors, the scientific work here is fun and successful.”

Dr. Stefanie Todt delivered impressive research results in the field of particle physics with her dissertation on "The W±W± Scattering Process". She completed the work under the supervision of Prof. Michael Kobel at the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics. Her major contributions to the modelling, discovery and interpretation of the scattering of W bosons at CERN's Large Hadron Collider laid the foundation for new physics that, after further investigation, could provide clues to new particles or substructures of known particles. In the meantime, Stefanie Todt is working as a postdoc at TUD Dresden University of Technology and at the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

The Dresdner Promotionspreis Physik is awarded annually and honours outstanding doctoral theses in physics at TUD Dresden University of Technology. The prize is endowed with a total of 4,000 euros and was donated by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation. This year, the prize committee considered a total of six outstanding nominations. The work of Anton Kirch and Stefanie Todt was of such particular excellence that the prize was split.

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Dresdner Promotionspreis Physik 2023

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