Silvia Viola Kusminskiy is Professor for Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, leading the group “Theory of Hybrid Quantum Systems”. After undergraduate studies at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, she obtained her PhD in Physics from Boston University in the USA. She continued her academic career in Germany, where she held postdoctoral positions at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuernberg, and MPL. Her research comprises mesoscopic systems and light-matter interaction, with emphasis on collective phenomena and a focus on hybrid quantum systems including magnetic degrees of freedom.