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discovered_01_2015 - HZDR Doctoral Candidate Among Best in the World

PORTRAIT// THE HZDR RESEARCH MAGAZINE WWW.HZDR.DE 34 35 HZDR doctoral candidate among best in the world Karl Zeil from HZDR’s Institute of Radiation Physics won the 2015 John Dawson Prize. In his doctoral thesis he sought to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of laser particle acceleration – which is of high importance to scale the energy of the particles. The aim is to develop a compact laser accelerator for modern proton therapy cancer treatment. Every two years, the two best theoretical and experimental doctoral theses in plasma acceleration are honored with the ‘John Dawson Thesis Prize’. Karl Zeil received the € 1,000 award during this year’s Laser Plasma Acceleration Workshop (LPAW) which was held on the island of Guadeloupe from May 10-15, 2015. The American John M. Dawson (1930 - 2001) was a distinguished plasma physicist and one of the pioneers of accelerator research. Now Karl Zeil, who had already received first prize in the Behnken-Berger Foundation’s awards for junior scientists, is following in his oversize footsteps. He recently became head of his own HZDR Young Investigators Group on laser-ion acceleration. Award granted by the journal ‘Nuklearmedizin 2015’ Frank Hofheinz from HZDR’s Institute of Radio- pharmaceutical Cancer Research received the award conferred by the specialist journal ‘Nuklearmedizin’ for his 2012 article, which was cited most frequently last year: F. Hofheinz, C. Pötzsch, L. Oehme, B. Beuthien-Baumann, J. Steinbach, J. Kotzerke, J. van den Hoff: Automatic volume delineation in oncological PET. Evaluation of a dedicated software tool and comparison with manual delineation in clinical data sets, in Nuklearmedizin 2012, Vol. 51, pp. 9 – 16. Jörg Kotzerke, one of the co-authors and President of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nuklearmedizin, presented the award to Frank Hofheinz during the association’s Annual Meeting in Hannover on April 25. New Research Fellow What do many passionate researchers dream of? Spending most of their time in the lab and as little as possible on meetings and mindless bureaucracy. What a bonus if an institution can offer selected top researchers precisely that. HZDR has now awarded the third ‘HZDR Research Fellowship’ to Stephan Winnerl. ‘We are honoring his top-level research achievements,’ said Scientific Director Roland Sauerbrey. ‘The number and quality of his publications is outstanding and we hope that the Fellowship will drive his career further.’ With this open- ended honor, the 45-year-old is following the example of Stefan Facsko from the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research to which he also belongs, and Frank Stefani from the Institute of Fluid Dynamics. Winnerl began his scientific career at Universität Regensburg (UR), where he completed an excellent PhD, having previously spent a year abroad at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. His specialization is in ultrafast spectroscopy of semiconducting materials, preferentially using terahertz beams in the spectral range between microwaves and infrared light. With its two free electron lasers, HZDR offers the perfect radiation sources for this kind of research. Winnerl has already chaperoned many visiting scientists and is involved in long-term collaborations with colleagues like Lukas Eng from TU Dresden who established near-field laser microscopy. This helps physicists to track down exotic properties in semiconductors. Nor is Winnerl indifferent to mentoring students and doctoral candidates either, as the outstanding results he has achieved with his group amply demonstrates. These have already brought him two HZDR Awards. Currently, he is in receipt of funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to focus on the ‘miracle material’ graphene. _Text . Christine Bohnet 34 35 Stephan Winnerl receives the 2012 HZDR Research Award from Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich and HZDR Scientific Director Roland Sauerbrey (right to left) Photo: Oliver Killig

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