Adlershof Dissertation Prize for Martin Hempel
The three finalists who were competing against one another on 13 February really were the academic elite. All three of them completed their dissertation in Adlershof in the past 18 months. In order to win the Adlershof Dissertation Prize, they had to present their results in a particularly understandable way in a short lecture.
Martin Hempel (30) is researching at the Max Born Institute (MBI) where he is currently a postdoc. In his dissertation, which was supervised by Thomas Elsässer, Director of the MBI and professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HU), the physicist looked at high performance diode lasers. Hempel was particularly interested in Catastrophic Optical Damage (COD) in which the laser suddenly breaks down and is destroyed. As Hempel found out, this started with an alteration of the material, then there is a self-reinforcing process which leads to a local melting of the laser material at approximately 1,600°C. Secondary damage then completely destroys the laser. Using thermographic and spectroscopic methods, Hempel was able to follow the development of the defect. He developed a model which can reconstruct the defect process and identify weaknesses in the construction element. On 13 February, Martin Hempel won over the jury and was announced the winner of the 2013 Dissertation Prize.
Two other nominees also competed for the Adlershof Dissertation Prize, who had been awarded annual by HU, the Initiative Community of Non-University Research Facilities in Adlershof (Initiativgemeinschaft Außeruniversitärer Forschungseinrichtungen in Adlershof e. V., IGAFA) and WISTA-MANAGEMENT GMBH.
The chemist Nicole Welsch was supervised by Professor Matthias Ballauff of the Helmholtz Centre in Berlin and HU, and looked at synthetic colloidal microgels. She placed a soft polymer layer onto a solid polystyrene core, which reacts very sensitively to changes in the temperature, acidity or salt concentration. As a result of what Welsch calls "controllable features", the microgels are interesting for a number of applications. They can be used as question particles in biocatalysers, or for diagnostics in medicine. In certain applications, the adsorption of proteins is to be prevented, in others it is to be induced in a targeted manner. Welsch was able to research the interactions between proteins and microgels using sensitive calorimetric and spectroscopic methods. She also developed a model which can be used to reliably describe the adsorption of proteins. The 29-year-old has been working as a postdoc at the Georgia Institute of Technology since March 2013. She wants to return in 2015.
The dissertation by Jan-Carl Beucke (32), completed under the supervision of Professor Norbert Kathmann at the HU Institute of Psychology, dealt with patients with compulsive disorders suffering from troubling thoughts, such as whether they had turned the stove off. "Although the assumption has been made since the 1980s that patients with compulsive disorders had anomalies in specific, closed neurone circuits, previous research has only looked at how active the associated regions of the brains are," says Beucke. This is why the psychologist chose to look at how communication between the circuits near to the surface and those in the depths of the brain functions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, it was possible to show that the circuit areas in those patients showed abnormal links, not only within the circuits but also with far-reaching parts of the brain.
By Paul Janositz