Materials research in Mainz to be expanded even further / Carl Zeiss Foundation supports professorship
17.12.2014
The Chemistry and Physics institutes at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) will be able to offer students a new teaching curriculum focusing on "oxidic materials" starting in the 2015/2016 winter semester. This is being made possible by a professorship supported by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Chemistry Professor Angela Möller has accepted the call for this newly created endowed professorship in Mainz. For the technology group SCHOTT, which is based in Mainz and owned by the Carl Zeiss Foundation, filling this position represents yet another move toward expanding its many years of cooperation with Mainz University that has already accounted for many impulses in the area of materials development. "In the area of oxidic materials, which also includes our specialty glasses and glass-ceramics, the research potential is still far from being fully leveraged," said Dr. Hans-Joachim Konz, the Board member responsible for research at SCHOTT.
Angela Möller was born in Bünde, East-Westphalia, received her doctorate degree at Leibniz University Hannover in 1993, and habilitated at the University of Cologne in 2002. Her main research focuses include high temperature superconducting and chemical materials. Before she left to become an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Houston in Texas in 2009, she had held various scientific positions, among others as a lecturer at the University of Cologne. She has also received a number of distinguished honors and awards during her scientific career, for example the Welch Foundation Professorship Award from the Texas Center for Superconductivity (TcSUH) at the University of Houston in 2009, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2012, and the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award from the University Commission on Women.
"We are delighted to see Professor Angela Möller appointed to this position. She has an understanding of and experience with a broad range of oxidic materials with a main focus on synthesis, magnetism, structural chemistry, and spectroscopy. This spectrum fits in extremely well with SCHOTT's research activities and we expect to see a number of synergies arise from the future collaboration," emphasized SCHOTT Research Fellow Dr. Roland Langfeld.
Materials research has a long and extremely successful tradition in Mainz. Materials sciences even rank among the cutting-edge fields of study and research at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. The highly regarded international expertise in this field is also grounded in the cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, with the Fraunhofer ICT IMM, and with a number of industrial partners. "Professor Angela Möller's profile matches the tender 'Oxidic Materials' just perfectly," said Professor Georg Krausch, President of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "By filling this endowed professorship, we will be able to further strengthen materials research in Mainz on a high level."
Besides traditional semiconductors, oxides rank among the most important classes of materials for applications in electronics, optics, sensors, and energy technology. Thanks to their physical properties, they are becoming increasingly important as functional materials for future technologies, especially as materials for use in energy efficiency.