HZB Newsroom

Climate change has Amran Al-Ashouri concerned. As a physicist, he knows how urgently and quickly measures need to be taken to limit the global temperature increase to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius. In his private life, the 29-year-old scientist is accordingly a member of the association “climactivity”, which aims to educate as many people as possible about important matters in climate protection.

Annette Pietzsch has many jobs: the physicist develops instruments for BESSY II that researchers can use to observe how molecules interact with each other. She mostly prefers to use the instruments to do her own research. This is what brought her from Sweden to HZB ten years ago.

Steve Albrecht is researching on perovskite solar cells and holds several efficiency world records with his team. Back in his schooldays, he was going to become either a competitive gymnast or a scientist. He chose science, but the same athletic ambition still drives his research forward.

For Marcel Risch, it feels like a homecoming: as a student, he had previously run experiments at the Berlin particle accelerator BESSY II. After working for several years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and then in Göttingen, he is now establishing his own group at HZB – supported by funding from the European Research Council.

Christiane Becker uses microscopic structures to increase the amount of light captured in solar cells and is currently scaling up the technology for industrial application. “On top of everything else, there’s this spirit at HZB that we are working on the renewable energies of the future, and that is incredibly inspiring,” she relates in portrait.