Plenary Speaker

Kornelius Nielsch has been Director of the Institute for Metallic Materials (IMW) at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW) since 2015, where he leads a research group working on sustainable thermoelectric materials and devices for thermoelectric cooling. Professor Nielsch received his diploma in physics from the University of Duisburg in 1997 and his Ph.D. in physics from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, in 2002. From 2002 to 2003, he was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT after which he took up the position of group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, in 2003. He then moved to the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Hamburg, where he served as Professor of Experimental Physics from 2007 to 2015. From 2009 to 2015, he coordinated the Priority Program on Nanostructured Thermoelectrics, and he is currently coordinating the Marie Curie Doctoral Network on Mg-based alloys for thermoelectric cooling in collaboration with 15 partner institutions across Europe.