Beate Naroska Guest Professorships 2022Quantum Universe honors Prof. Dr. Claudia de Rham and Dr. Gudrun Wanner

9 February 2023

Portraits of the Beate Naroska Guest Professorship 2022 laureates

Photo: Linda Nylind (left), Wanner (right)

The laureates of the Beate Naroska Senior and Junior Guestprofessorships 2022, Prof. Dr. Claudia de Rham (left) and Dr. Gudrun Wanner (right).

The Beate Naroska Guest Professorships 2022 of the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe go to Prof. Dr. Claudia de Rham (Imperial College London) and Dr. Gudrun Wanner (AEI Hannover). Claudia de Rham and Gudrun Wanner receive the award for their outstanding research in Theoretical Physics and Gravitational Physics, respectively, as well as for their active involvement in creating equal opportunities for women in physics.

The Beate Naroska Senior Guest Professorship goes to theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Claudia de Rham. After completing her PhD at Cambridge University, de Rham was a Postdoc at McGill University as well as at the McMaster University and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. In the course of her career, Prof. de Rham has received several awards, such as the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom in 2020. De Rham furthermore has been principal investigator in several third-party funded projects; for instance, from 2017 to 2022, she was principal investigator of the Consolidator Grant “Massive Gravity and Cosmology” of the European Research Council. While excelling in her field as an accomplished scientist, Prof. de Rham is also a dedicated teacher to many early career researchers and thus considered a great role model for women in physics. She is currently working as a professor at the Imperial College London, UK, while also being a Simons Emmy Noether Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada and a Simons Investigator.

Prof. Dr. Claudia de Rham: “It is very humbling to honour Beate Naroska's legacy not only for her achievements in research but also for the inspirational figure she was. The program is a unique opportunity to collaborate with so many of the amazing researchers at DESY and Hamburg University and particularly to establish new contacts with young physicists. There are still so many questions that elude us about the origin, composition, and fate of our Universe and as we continuously search for signs of new physics, I look forward to collaborating with the Quantum Universe Cluster of Excellence to get a better handle on how to make sense of what we know and what we don't.”

Gravitational physicist Dr. Gudrun Wanner receives the Beate Naroska Junior Guest Professorship. In 2010, she completed her PhD at Hannover’s Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics with summa cum laude. Since then, she has been working as a research scientist for the Albert Einstein Institute’s department of “Laser interferometry and gravitational wave astronomy”, where her work supported the technology demonstrator mission LISA Pathfinder and, nowadays, the space gravitational wave detector mission LISA. She is now an Independent Group Leader with a focus on optical simulations at the Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers at Leibniz University in Hannover.

Dr. Gudrun Wanner: “I am honoured to have been selected as a recipient of the Beate Naroska Guest Professorship. I am thankful for this opportunity to scientifically exchange with colleagues in the various fields involved in Quantum Universe. With my background in the LISA mission, I am naturally particularly interested in the work on gravitational waves happening within Quantum Universe. Additionally, I look forward to learning more about the dark matter research within the cluster, a topic addressed from completely different angles in particle physics and in gravitational wave science. Finally, I look forward to exchanging experiences made within the different Clusters of Excellence in Hannover and Hamburg.”

Since 2020, Quantum Universe honors the scientific excellence of international female scientists and their commitment to creating equal opportunities for women in cluster-related research fields with the Beate Naroska Guest Professorships. The Cluster of Excellence awards each a senior and a junior guest professorship every year, endowed with 7,500 and 5,000 euros respectively.

The award ceremony to honor the Beate Naroska Guest Professorship 2022 laureates will be held at the DESY Auditorium, for the first time in presence, on February 14th, 2023.

Beate Naroska

Particle physicist Beate Naroska (1943–2008) was a professor at Universität Hamburg from 1989 to 2008. During this time, she was one of the leading scientists of the H1 experiment at DESY's HERA collider. As a professor, she was a mentor for many students and young researchers. Beate Naroska studied physics in Göttingen and Hamburg. After her diploma, she received her doctorate at Universität Hamburg under Martin Teucher. From 1971 to 1978, she worked at CERN, where she conducted research on proton–proton scattering and on the development of multiwire proportional chambers. She then returned to DESY where she joined the JADE experiment at PETRA as responsible of the TOF system and researching on electroweak phenomena.