May 21, 2021
Karl Leo receives Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences
Physics Professor Karl Leo of Technische Universität Dresden will be awarded the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC) in an online award ceremony today, Friday, May 21, 2021. With the medal, named after the great French mathematician-physicist-philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the EURASC has been recognizing outstanding and demonstrated personal contributions to science and technology as well as the promotion of excellence in research and education since 2003.
The third honor within a short period of time: Prof. Dr. Karl Leo, director of the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) and founder of the Dresden Integrated Center for Applied Physics and Photonic Materials (IAPP) at the TU Dresden, is currently reaping the fruits of his highly successful research in the field of organic semiconductors over the past two decades. After being awarded the Jan Rajchmann Prize in April and nominated for the European Inventor Award at the beginning of May, the top researcher is now receiving another special award: the Blaise Pascal Medal in Physics from the European Academy of Sciences, a non-profit, independent, non-governmental organization. In addition to Karl Leo, four other people will receive the Blaise Pascal Medal this year: Maria J. Esteban (mathematics), Clément Sanchez (chemistry), Isaac Elishakoff (engineering) and Andrea Ferrari (materials science).
As part of the online award ceremony on May 21, Leo will give a short talk on how organic semiconductors evolved from a lab curiosity to efficient and sustainable mass application. Thirty years have passed since he saw the first organic light-emitting diode (OLED) in 1991 and was immediately fascinated by the subject. Initially ridiculed by experts, Leo worked with a dedicated and motivated team at the Chair of Optoelectronics at TU Dresden on methods to increase the efficiency of OLEDs. The breakthrough came in 1998, when his team first produced an organic OLED that was much more efficient, sustainable and had a longer lifetime than earlier versions.
From then on, things went steeply uphill and Karl Leo never fell tired of discovering new application fields for organic semiconductors and launching successful spin-offs from them. In the meantime, OLED displays, organic solar cells and organic sensors developed at TU Dresden are marketed worldwide. Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth was one of Leo's first doctoral students at TU Dresden, later co-founder of novaled GmbH and today one of his closest companions. He knows: "A key characteristic of Karl Leo is that he encourages and motivates the people around him. He has the attitude "Anything goes!" In an incomparable way, he combines positive spirit with inventiveness in one person."
For the coming years, jack-of-all-trades Leo already has other milestones in the pipeline: commercializing organic transistors and expanding the interface between organic electronics and biological systems. Geographically, Leo may soon expand his reach as well. As spokesperson for the Saxonian Institute of Technology (SIT), he wants to work with a unique consortium of top TUD researchers from fields such as materials research, communications engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, sustainability research and social sciences, as well as non-university partners, to turn Lusatia into a high-tech model region for digital transformation. The project proposal for the “Saxonian Institute of Technology” is a contribution in the competition for a large-scale research center as part of the funding initiative "Knowledge creates perspectives for the region" of the Free State of Saxony and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) - and, if successful, could become exemplary for all of Germany.
More information: https://www.eurasc.org/eurasc-awardees/blaise-pascal-medals
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