Appointment of Thomas Lippert as new head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments (LMX)

Starting 1. December 2022, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert will be the new head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments (LMX). He follows Prof. Dr. Laura Heyderman, our first laboratory head who successfully formed and established the LMX in the PSI landscape as a Centre of Materials.

Thomas Lippert studied at the University of Bayreuth, where he completed his doctorate on laser ablation of polymers and the development of polymers for laser ablation. After obtaining his PhD, he became a postdoctoral researcher at Wacker Chemie Burghausen where he investigated photo-activatable Pt catalysts. As an Alexander v. Humboldt/Science and Technology Agency postdoctoral fellow, he has been working on surface modifications of polymers in Tsukuba (Japan) as a result of laser-matter interaction. Following his stay in Japan, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory using ultrafast spectroscopy on high-energy materials as a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow and Technical Staff Member.

Since 1999 Thomas Lippert has been at the Paul Scherrer Institute, first as Senior Scientist and since 2002 as Group Leader. In the same year he obtained his habilitation in Physical Chemistry at the ETH Zurich. From 2002 to 2013 he was a Private Lecturer at the ETH Zurich in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences and became in 2013 a Titular Professor in the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry at ETHZ.

Thomas Lippert was a member of the PSI Research Commission from 2013 to 2021 and is the PSI technical expert for laser safety at PSI since 2005. He was also Vice President of the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) from 2011 to 2013 and its President from 2014 to 2015. Since 2016, he has been Principle Investigator for the Advanced Energy Conversion Systems Thrust at the International Institute for Carbon Neutral Energy Research at Kyushu University in Japan.

The research interest of Thomas Lippert is the physics and chemistry of functional oxide materials in the context of energy materials (e.g. photo-chemical water splitting, battery related materials, multiferroics) as well as understanding the dynamics of the laser-induced deposition of oxides by pulsed laser deposition.