Claudia Anna-Maria Felser to receive Von Hippel Award, the Materials Research Society’s highest honor

WARRENDALE, PA—The Materials Research Society (MRS) is pleased to announce that Claudia Anna-Maria Felser, Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, has been selected to receive the 2024 Von Hippel Award, the Society's highest honor. Felser is being honored for the prediction and experimental realization of new topological quantum materials, with remarkable topological properties for new concepts of computing and energy conversion. 

Felser will accept the honor during the 2024 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit in Boston, Massachusetts, and present her lecture, Topology and Chirality, on Wednesday, December 4 at 6:15 pm (ET).  

Conferred annually, the Von Hippel Award recognizes the qualities most prized by materials scientists and engineers—brilliance and originality of intellect, combined with vision that transcends the boundaries of conventional scientific disciplines, as exemplified by the life and work of Arthur von Hippel.

Felser studied chemistry and physics at the University of Cologne (Germany, completing there both her diploma in solid state chemistry (1989) and her doctorate in physical chemistry (1994). After postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart (Germany) and the CNRS in Nantes (France), she joined the University of Mainz (Germany) in 1996 becoming a full professor there in 2003.

In 2011 and again in 2017, she received an ERC Advanced grant. Felser was honored as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Magnetics Society, she received the Alexander M. Cruickshank Lecturer Award of the Gordon Research Conference, a SUR-grant Award from IBM and the Tsungmin Tu Research Prize from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, the highest academic honor granted to foreign researchers in Taiwan. In 2019, Claudia Felser was awarded the APS James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials together with Bernevig (Princeton) and Dai (Hongkong). She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, London. In 2018, she became a member of the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, and acatech, the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. Since 2020, Felser has been an international member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and in 2021, she has been appointed as an international member to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In 2022 she was awarded the Max Born Prize and Medal of DPG (German Physical Society) and IOP (Institute of Physics), the Wilhelm-Ostwald-Medal of the Saxon Academy of Scienc and the Blaise Pascal Medal in Materials Sciences. Claudia Felser was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and the Hall of Fame of German Science in 2023 and, together with Andre Bernevig, received the 2023 EPS Europhysics Prize.