Diversity in Graphene Career Event 2022

Claudia Backes is Chair Professor of Physical Chemistry of Nanomaterials at Kassel. Backes is a chemist by training and has received her Ph.D. with honours in 2011 from the University of Erlangen, Germany, working under the supervision of Andreas Hirsch. After some time as deputy executive director in the Erlangen Cluster of Excellence “Engineering of Advanced Materials,” Claudia received a fellowship grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2012 and moved to Jonathan Coleman’s group at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. In 2015, she returned to Germany and started her independent research at the Chair of Applied Physical Chemistry at Heidelberg University funded through the prestigious Emmy Noether funding from the German Research Foundation from 2016. In October 2021, she was appointed to her current position. Her research interests are in liquid exfoliation, nanosheet size control and size-dependent properties, chemical modification and production of composites and hybrid structures.

Bárbara Canto is a Senior Research Associate at AMO GmbH in Aachen, Germany, where she is responsible for a project on ultra-fast graphene photodetectors. She received her PhD in Science (Experimental Physics) in Brazil (UFRGS- Porto Alegre) in 2014. During this time she began working on graphene and device fabrication. She worked as a Post Doc fellow in Brazil (UFRGS - Porto Alegre) for three years (2015 to 2018) before moving to Germany in 2018 with a Marie Curie Fellowship to continue her studies in the area of graphene transistors at AMO GmbH. From 2020 to 2022 she was a Senior Research Associate at the Wuppertal University in the Chair of Smart Sensor Systems before returning to AMO GmbH to her current position.

Amos Martinez is a Nature Materials editor. He is based in London, UK, where he handles manuscripts in the areas of photonics, plasmonics and metamaterials. He received his PhD in photonics from Aston University (UK) and then divided his time between academia and industry. In the University of Tokyo, he studied the mode-locking of fibre lasers using carbon nanotubes and 2D materials. He worked as an editor in Nature Communications, a scientist in Toshiba Research Europe Labs (Cambridge, UK) and a research associate in the University of Cambridge working towards the commercialization of fibre lasers. 

Vittorio Pellegrini is Chief Executive Officer of BeDimensional Spa, Italy. He got the PhD in Physics in 1996 from Scuola Normale Superiore. Author of more than 200 scientific publications and 11 patents. Currently he is the head of Division Energy&Composite&Production of the European Graphene Flagship. He was Chair of the Executive Board of the Graphene Flagship (2016-2018), and Founder and Director of IIT Graphene Labs (2014-2020). He has been assistant professor at Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), Research Director at the National Research Council (Italy), and principal investigator at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy). He was a member of staff at AT&T Laboratories (USA) and at Columbia University (USA). He wrote several popular scientific articles for national newspapers and magazines and he is the author of the book “Il lampo dell’elettrone” (March 2021, Codice Edizioni).

Lilei Ye is a business developer for electronics within the Graphene Flagship, based at Chalmers Industriteknik, Sweden. She has more than 10 years of experience in SME and worked with nanomaterials and 2D material development in electronics and thermal management. She has been involved in technical project management at the interface between academia and industry with business development, product development and technology transfer.