Plenary speakers

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 Vivien Zapf CANCELED

Vivien Zapf is a scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Lab at Los Alamos National Lab. She studies quantum magnetism and magnetoelectric properties and recently focuses on molecular compounds and spin crossovers. She uses high magnetic fields including 100 T pulsed magnets to study the magnetic properties of materials using thermodynamic and magnetoelectric measurement techniques. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and serves as the chair-elect of the American Physical Society's Division of Materials Physics. She has won the Millikan Postdoctoral prize from Caltech, the Lee-Oscheroff Richard Prize and a Distinguished Performance Award from Los Alamos National Lab.

Multiferroic • Magnetoelectric • Spin crossover • Quantum magnetism

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 Mario Ruben

Mario Ruben obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Jena, Germany. During a DAAD post-doctoral fellowship, he worked in Prof. J.-M. Lehn’s research group at the ISIS in Strasbourg, France. In 2001, he moved to the Institute of Nanotechnology in Karlsruhe and in 2010, he accepted a position as Professor at the Université de Strasbourg, France. In 2013, he became Full Professor for Molecular Materials at the Institutes of Inorganic Chemistry and of Nanotechnology at the KIT.  He is founding member of the Institute of Quantum Materials and –Technology at KIT (since 2020) and of the Centre Européen de Sciences Quantiques (CESQ) at the University Strasbourg (since 2021). His research interests involve the design, synthesis, and physical characterization of functional molecules and their implementation and integration into operational nano-systems for molecular spintronics and quantum computation. He is holding several distinctions and awards e.g. 2016 the WPI Professorship Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan and 2014 the Zharadnik-Lecture of the Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Molecular quantum devices • Molecular qudits • Isotopologue chemistry • CO₂ activation

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 Rainer Herges

Rainer Herges was born in St. Ingbert, Saarland (now Germany), in 1955. He studied Chemistry at the University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken, and moved to the Technical University of Munich, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1984 under Prof. Ivar Ugi. After 1 year as a postdoc at the University of Southern California with Professor George Olah, he joined the group of Prof. P. v. R. Schleyer at the University of Erlangen for habilitation. He received a C3 position as Professor at the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the Technical University Braunschweig in 1996, and in 2001 he was appointed a Full Professorship of Organic Chemistry at the University of Kiel. His current research interests concern molecular assemblers, molecular spin switches and their application as intelligent MRI contrast agents, switchable self-assembled surfaces.

Switchable molecular magnets • Molecular assembler • Self-assembled surfaces • Contrast agents