Researcher of the Year 2020

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Prof. Herbert Gleiter obtained his PhD from Max Planck Institute of Materials Science and the University of Stuttgart in 1966. He worked for several years at Harvard University and MIT as a Research Fellow. Dr. Gleiter is a revolutionary researcher of the world of nanoscience and his work is primarily focused on the application of nanotechnology, studying nanoglasses, which is a new class of non-crystalline nanomaterials. He also focuses on the transition between classical physics and quantum physics. In the year 1970, Prof. Gleiter demonstrated a new class of materials: nano-crystalline materials. Later in his career, in the year 1989, he initiated the development of a new class of non-crystalline solids, called nanoglasses. These nanoglasses possess new properties that differ from those of today’s glasses and thus, lead to a range of novel applications that pave the way for a lot of new technologies

In the last three decades, Prof Gleiter has conducted some ground-breaking research in nanoscience and nanotechnology. With this discovery and development of new materials, his work is bound to have long-lasting positive consequences not just for the scientific line of enquiries, but also for the daily life of human beings in the future. Since 1988, Prof. Gleiter’s works of scientific literature have been cited more than 15,000 times. He has received several prizes, such as the Leibniz Prize, the Max Planck Research Prize, Glod Medals of Acta Materials and the of the Federation of European Materials Societies, the Heisenberg and the Humboldt Medals, the R.F. Mehl and the Von Hippel Prizes, the Blaise Pascal Medal of th European Academy of Sciences, and many more.