Junior Professor Elina Fuchs: "I would like to thank the DFG warmly and am very happy about the recognition of my research in particle physics and its interface with atomic physics. The prize money enables me to finance a post-doctoral position, strengthen international projects and invite guests to Hannover. This will allow me to expand the interdisciplinary research topics in the exciting start-up phase of my working group and hopefully anchor my group in Hannover and our Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers in the long term.
Falko Mohrs, Lower Saxony's Minister for Science and Culture, comments: "Congratulations to junior professor Elina Fuchs on receiving Germany's most important young scientist award. With her scientific work at Leibniz Universität Hannover and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, she is conducting research at a central point in the Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers. The scientist from Lower Saxony has already achieved outstanding results with her research in the field of particle physics in Switzerland, Israel and the USA. I am all the more pleased that the research and science region of Lower Saxony is offering Prof. Dr. Elina Fuchs attractive working conditions."
About the person:
Elina Fuchs grew up in Hanover, studied at the University of Göttingen and did her doctorate at the German Electron Synchrotron DESY and the University of Hamburg. After her doctorate, she conducted research as a Minerva Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and, after four years, took up a Feodor Lynen Fellowship at Fermilab and the University of Chicago in the USA. Since 2021, she has also held a prestigious Senior Research Fellowship at the CERN research centre. Her research focus is particle physics beyond the Standard Model. In the Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers, she leads a fundamental group that deals with high-precision atomic spectroscopy, dark matter and the modification of constants. She also coordinates the theory branch of the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative.
About the prize:
The Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prizes have been awarded annually since 1977 by the German Research Foundation to outstanding researchers who are at an early stage of their scientific careers. The award is intended to support and encourage the prize winners, who do not yet hold a permanent professorship, to continue pursuing their scientific careers. It is not only their dissertation that is honoured, but in particular whether they have subsequently developed an independent scientific profile and enrich the scientific community with their research results, so that top scientific achievements can also be expected from them in the future. The prize has been named after the nuclear physicist and former DFG President Heinz Maier-Leibnitz since 1980. A total of 171 researchers from all disciplines were nominated for this year's award. Seven female researchers and three male researchers were awarded the prize.
