Summer Colloquium 2018

Please see below for the schedule and registration.

The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is delighted to invite you to its annual scientific summer colloquium, formerly referred to as the Günter Petzow Colloquium.

Date: Friday, July 13, 2018, starting at 1:00 pm
Location: MPI, Lecture Hall 2D5, Heisenbergstraße 1, Stuttgart

This colloquium, which has been organized annually since 2002 at the MPI-IS Stuttgart site, will start with coffee at 1:00 pm. A set of five scientific presentations will commence at 1:30 pm. The lectures will be held in English and cover popular science topics. All current and former employees, friends of the institute, and the interested public are welcome to attend this event, as the colloquium's purpose is to strengthen the institute's scientific connection with people in the region.

Professor Manfred Rühle
We are using the occasion of the 2018 scientific colloquium to celebrate Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Manfred Rühle's 80th birthday, which is taking place this year. Specifically, the colloquium will include a talk in honor of Prof. Rühle by a prominent graduate of his research group. We are delighted to announce that the speaker will be Prof. Dawn Bonnell, who was his Ph.D student at MPI and is now a chaired Professor and Vice Provost for Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

Between 1989 and 2005, Prof. Manfred Rühle was a Scientific Member and Director for the Microstructure and Interfaces department. In January 2009, four years after his appointment as Emeritus Director, he was called to serve as Acting Director for the Low Dimensional and Metastable Materials department, a position that he held for almost another four years.

Prof. Rühle is internationally known as one of the leading specialists in the research of modern materials by high-resolution (transmission electron) microscopy. His greatest achievement was to make the structure of grain boundaries in metals and ceramics and the interfaces in composite materials visible. The knowledge gained in this way allows in principle a targeted adjustment of the structures in polycrystals, layer systems and nanostructures.

Günter Petzow Prize
On the occasion of this year's scientific colloquium, the Stuttgart site of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems will award the 13th annual Günter Petzow Prize to a young scientist from the institute for outstanding research in the field of material sciences. Prof. Dr. Günter Petzow was a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart between 1973 and 1994. He is internationally renowned for his trend-setting research on multicomponent materials.

The Günter Petzow Prize is sponsored by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and Volkswagen AG.

Given his outstanding research success here at MPI-IS, the selection committee has chosen to bestow upon:

Dr. Wenqi Hu
the
2018 Günter Petzow Prize.

Dr. Wenqi Hu is a postdoctoral researcher in the Physical Intelligence department. He is presently conducting extensive tests of a miniature soft-bodied robot on various biological phantoms for medical applications. The results of these research activities have been patented by the tech transfer institution Max Planck Innovation. Besides this, Dr. Hu has also worked on many other projects in the fields of biological materials, electrical materials, and microrobotics in recent years, resulting in 14 published journal articles (6 as first author), 15 conference papers (7 as first author), and 5 invention disclosures.

Dr. Hu will receive his prize during the IS Summer Colloquium, where his nominator, Dr. Metin Sitti, will introduce him before his talk.