Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik

PDI is pleased to announce its second successful award under the NSF–DFG Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program. The newly funded project, "AI-Driven Platform for 2D Materials Synthesis and Discovery," is co-led at PDI by Assoc. Prof. Nadire Nayir, Head of PDI's Computational Materials Science Group (COMMAT). The project marks an important milestone in PDI's strategic expansion into AI-enabled and data-driven materials research.

Weaver Emma Wood joins PDI as 2026 Artist-in-Residence. In this interview, she talks about twenty years inside the "strict planning" of her craft, why she's excited to be the elephant in the room at a physics institute, and what a conversation between a weaver and a physicist might sound like.

PDI is pleased to announce that João Marcelo Lopes has been invited to join the DFG Cluster of Excellence "Center for Chiral Electronics" (CCE) as an associate partner. This invitation is a direct reflection of Lopes's standing in the field, and opens a valuable new channel connecting PDI's epitaxy and materials expertise with the Cluster's work on chirality-driven device concepts.

Congratulations to Jingxuan Kang, who successfully defended his doctoral thesis, “(In,Ga)N Layer Growth on Planar Substrates and Top-Down Nanowires,” on July 9th, 2026. Jingxuan completed his PhD jointly at PDI and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, conducting his research under the supervision of Lutz Geelhaar at PDI.