Laura Na Liu receives 2018 Kavli Foundation Early Career Award

Stuttgart – Laura Na Liu, who heads the independent research group "Smart Nanoplasmonics" at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, receives the 2018 Kavli Foundation Early Career Lectureship in Materials Science. The Kavli Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work. The Kavli Foundation Early Career Award is one of several annual awards granted by the Materials Research Society (MRS). It honors those whose work has already had a major impact in the field, who are outstanding exponents of their science in the early stages of their career, young researchers whose work already leads to great expectations for future leadership. The award includes a $1,000 cash prize as well as the opportunity of presenting a talk. This year, the committee honored Laura Na Liu, who´s research interests are multi-disciplinary: She works at the interface between nanoplasmonics, biology and chemistry. Her group focuses on developing sophisticated and smart plasmonic nanosystems for answering structural biology questions as well as catalytic chemistry questions in local environments.

“This award means a lot to me”, says Laura Na Liu. “It is an encouraging recognition of my group activities. I am extremely happy about it! I, together with all my group members will continue conducting interesting research and contribute to the excellence of the community.”

Laura Na Liu is a Professor at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Stuttgart in 2009, working on 3D complex plasmonics at optical frequencies. In 2010, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2011, she joined Rice University as Texas Instruments visiting professor. At the end of 2012, she became an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart. She joined the University of Heidelberg in 2015.

In her talk Na Liu will present at the award ceremony on 29th November in Boston, she will discuss sequentially a diverse set of DNA-assembled plasmonic nanostructures according to their characteristic optical properties. She will also discuss the inevitable evolution from static to dynamic plasmonic systems along with the fast development of this inter-disciplinary field. Finally, possible future directions and perspectives on the challenges are elucidated.

The 2018 Kavli Foundation Early Career Award is one of many prestigious awards Laura Na Liu has received so far. In 2010, she received the Hertha-Sponer-Prize of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG), the Nanowissenschaftspreis AGENT-D in 2011, the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2012, the Elisabeth Schiemann-Kolleg of the Max Planck Society Fellowship in 2013, the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in 2014, a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant in 2014, the Light2015 Young Women in Photonics Award of the European Optical Society (EOS) in 2015, the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics from the International Commission for Optics (ICO) in 2016, and the IUMRS – MRS Singapore Young Researcher Award Finalist in 2018.

Find out more about Laura Na Liu and her group here: https://www.is.mpg.de/de/liu/