New CINSaT speaker

At the general assembly on March 5, 2025, Prof. Dr. Johann Peter Reithmaier stepped down as spokesperson of the Center for Interdisciplinary Nanostructure Science and Technology (CINSaT) at the University of Kassel. He had been a member of CINSaT since 2005 and played a key role in shaping its development. From May 13, 2016, he represented CINSaT as spokesperson with great dedication and promoted interdisciplinary collaboration in nanostructure research at our university over many years.

As part of the same general assembly, Prof. Dr. Claudia Backes was elected as the new spokesperson of CINSaT. She has been a member of CINSaT since 2022 and has been actively involved in its scientific direction since then. Prof. Dr. Claudia Backes has held the Chair of Physical Chemistry of Nanomaterials at the University of Kassel since October 2021. She studied chemistry and received her Ph.D. with honors in 2011 from the University of Erlangen under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Andreas Hirsch. After serving as deputy executive director in the Cluster of Excellence "Engineering of Advanced Materials," she joined the group of Prof. Jonathan Coleman at Trinity College Dublin in 2012 with a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2015, she returned to Germany and led an Emmy Noether independent research group at Heidelberg University starting in 2016. Her research focuses on liquid-phase exfoliation, the control and modification of nanosheets, and the development of hybrid materials. Already during her time in Erlangen, she became enthusiastic about inter- and transdisciplinary research—an approach she now aims to further strengthen as spokesperson of CINSaT.