Jul 18, 2023
Physik-Preis Dresden 2023 awarded to Prof. Dr. Jörg Schmalian (KIT)
from left: Prof. Carsten Timm, Prof. Jörg Schmalian, Prof. Roderich Moessner.
On 11 July 2023, the Physik-Preis Dresden was awarded at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS). The prize is awarded annually jointly by the MPI-PKS and the Faculty of Physics at Dresden University of Technology. This year's laureate is Prof. Dr. Jörg Schmalian, from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, who was honoured for his outstanding contributions to the theory of condensed matter.
Jörg Schmalian received his doctoral degree in 1993 at the Freie University in Berlin. At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) he is the head of the Institute for Theory of Condensed Matter (TKM). His research group at TKM works on strongly correlated electron systems and complex quantum matter. He also heads the division Theory of Quantum Materials at the Institute for Quantum Materials and Technologies (IQMT) at KIT. Prior to moving to Karlsruhe in 2011, Dr. Schmalian was a full professor at Iowa State University and Senior Scientists at the Department of Energy Ames Laboratory. Schmalian serves on a number of international advisory boards, has co-organized numerous international conferences, workshops and summer schools, and has been honored by several awards, including a fellowship from the American Physical Society, the 2022 John Bardeen Prize for superconductivity theory, and teaching awards at Iowa State Univ. and KIT. He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Since 2022 he is Editor in Chief of Advances in Physics.
The Physik-Preis Dresden was endowed in 2015 by the Dresden physicist Prof. Peter Fulde, the founding director of the MPI-PKS. The prize winners are chosen by a joint commission of the TUD and the MPI-PKS. In addition to the central criterion of scientific excellence, it is particularly important for the decision that the work of the award winners is of special significance for the cooperation between the two DRESDEN-concept partners MPI-PKS and TUD and that their connection has been further strengthened in the long term.