Matthias Wuttig Honored as Outstanding Researcher
International Materials Research Society honors RWTH Professor as Fellow in recognition of his notable contributions to materials research.
RWTH Professor Matthias Wuttig – researcher at RWTH and Forschungszentrum Jülich – has been named 2019 MRS Fellow. MRS – short for Materials Research Society – thereby recognizes the physicist’s path-breaking contributions to the advancement of phase-change materials, including unraveling their unique bonding mechanism, unconventional transport properties, and unusual kinetics.
Founded in 1973, MRS is a growing, vibrant, and leading organization in interdisciplinary materials research. It is headquartered in Warrendale, Pennsylvania, US. MRS is formed of over 14,500 members who are material experts from industry, academia, and national labs. Over 90 different countries are represented in this research community, which covers the entire spectrum of material research, including physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering.
Wuttig is one of only three researchers in Germany that the MRS has named as Fellow up to now. Recently, the professor has been working on developing phase-change materials for storage applications. This category of materials features a special combination of properties, making it a promising candidate for data storage applications, for example in the form of chips.
Chips require innovative materials and structures to fulfill the need of greater computing power, while also drastically cutting energy consumption per arithmetic operation. This is the focus of Wuttig’s research at the JARA FIT Institute of Energy-Efficient Information Technology (Green IT) – part of the Jülich Aachen Research Alliance.
The European Research Council is funding Wuttig’s research on innovative components for data storage and processing with its ERC Advanced Grant. The research entails utilizing defects as functional components in order to tailor desired properties. This investigation is highly relevant for applications, and is being worked on at leading industrial nanoelectronics laboratories worldwide.
Matthias Wuttig studied physics at the University of Cologne. He subsequently worked at Forschungszentrum Jülich, where he stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher after completing his doctoral studies at RWTH. In October 1997, Wuttig took over RWTH’s Institute of Physics of New Materials. Over the course of his academic career, he has completed many research stays abroad. The physicist is a spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Center 917 Nanoswitches, as well as co-director of JARA-FIT.
To name just a few of his past accolades, Wuttig has been awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize by the German Ministry of Education and Research, the Gaede Prize by the German Vacuum Society, as well as the Stanford R. Ovshinsky Prize.