Toward new endeavors

AMO and the Chair of Electronic Devices (ELD) warmly congratulate Dr. Michael Hornung, Prof. Surendra Anantharaman, Dr. Damian Dudek, and Prof. Alwin Daus for the next steps in their professional careers.

Since the beginning of the year, there has been a rush of big announcements and changes at AMO.  In January, Dr. Michael Hornung has left the company to become Managing Director of GenISys GmbH, a company based in Munich, and a market leader in the field of e-beam lithography software. Michael Hornung has been Co-managing Director at AMO since 2014, and was the ultimate eminence concerning the subtleties and intricacies of different funding schemes and funding tenders. Hornung says: “For nine years, I have been commuting every two weeks between Aachen and Munich, where my family lives. During this time, I have come to appreciate and love Aachen, AMO, and the people here, and commuting never felt like a burden. However, now is the right time to move back home to my family.”

In May, Prof. Surendra Anantharaman has started as Assistant Professor at the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, India. Anantharaman has joined AMO in September 2022, as group leader of the Perovskite Optoelectronics Group. At IIT Madras, his research group will work on optoelectronic devices based on low-dimensional semiconductors. “I had a short stint at AMO but very intense,” says Anantharaman. “It is a bittersweet moment that I’ve to leave AMO just after a few months, but the opportunity at IIT Madras was something I could not refuse. At AMO, I found a young and dynamic international team supporting synergistic work environment among enthusiastic researchers from all over the world, and it was a great experience for me to be there. The good news is that IIT Madras and RWTH Aachen University have a long-standing strategic partnership, which Max (Lemme) and I intend to utilize for future collaborations.”

In the mid of May, Dr. Damian Dudek accepted a sudden offer from the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (Verband der Elektrotechnik Elektronik Informationstechnik, VDE) for a position as Managing Director of the Association for Information and Communication Technology, the largest association within the VDE. Dudek had joined ELD at the end of 2022, taking up the coordination of the Cluster NeuroSys. “It was a very short but intensive time for me in the very pleasant working environment in AMO and ELD,” says Dudek. “I was able to get to know many interesting topics, different personalities and very kind and open mined people. I plan to contribute to the field of semiconductor electronics and the related research in a new, coordinating role.”

Finally, in June Prof. Alwin Daus has started a Tenure-Track Professorship at the Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK) at University of Freiburg. Daus joined ELD in December 2021 from Stanford University, to work on neuromorphic devices based on 2D-materials within the Cluster NeuroSys. In 2022 he received an Emmy Noether grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG), to start his own independent junior research group.   “I would like to thank everyone for the great time the last 1.5 years here at ELD/AMO and I hope to stay in contact with many of you”, says Daus. “For now, my Emmy Noether group will remain at ELD, and move to Freiburg later, once the lab is sufficiently set up. I will also stay connected with the PhD students with whom there are ongoing projects, and we will complete them together. This will be the perfect basis also for future collaborations between our groups.”

“Our goal is to be a center of creativity where people can thrive and grow to their potential,” says Prof. Max Lemme, Managing Director of AMO and head of the Chair of Electronic Devices at RWTH. “It is great recognition for AMO and ELD when our colleagues are appointed to important positions in academia, policy or industry. I thank Michael, Surendra, Damian and Alwin for their excellent work at AMO/ELD and wish them every success in their new responsibilities.”