This page contains automatically translated content.

01/21/2025 | Pressemitteilung

Prof. Dr. Luis Bañares receives Humboldt Research Award

The physicist Prof. Dr. Luis Bañares, who is currently conducting research in Kassel, has been awarded the Humboldt Research Award. He received the award for his outstanding scientific achievements in the field of reaction dynamics and femtochemistry and in support of his scientific work at the University of Kassel. Prof. Dr. Luis Bañares has been researching chiral molecules at the University of Kassel since October 1, 2024 as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1319 ELCH - "Extreme light for sensing and driving molecular chirality".

Bañares comes from Madrid and began studying chemistry at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1985. He obtained his doctorate in chemistry there in 1990. Today, he is a professor at the Faculty of Chemical Sciences in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research focuses on time-resolved physical and chemical processes in the time scales in which nuclear and electron movements take place. He has already led research projects at national and European level. In 1995, he was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship to conduct research at the Institute of Physics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. "I am very proud to have been a Humboldtian since 1995," says Bañares. "It is a great honor to have received the Humboldt Research Award 2024 in recognition of my research achievements in the field of atomic and molecular physics. The research award strengthens my ties with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and with colleagues in Germany."

At the University of Kassel, he works at Faculty 10 (Mathematics and Natural Sciences) at the Institute of Physics in the Experimental Physics III - Femtosecond Spectroscopy and Ultrafast Laser Control Research Group. He will be supervised by research group leader Prof. Dr. Thomas Baumert: "We are delighted to have Luis Bañares on board. The Humboldt Research Award is also an award for the international networking of our Research Group in Kassel." Baumert is also a former spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Center ELCH.

With the Humboldt Research Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation honors leading international researchers from all departments from abroad. Each year, the Foundation awards up to 100 research awards with prize money of 60,000 euros. In addition, the award winners are given the opportunity to conduct research at an academic institution in Germany. The research stay lasts six to twelve months and can be divided up flexibly by the researchers. Bañares will be in Kassel until the end of March 2025 and, together with Baumert, will carry out new experiments on chiral molecules in the gas phase using a technique called photoelectron circular dichroism. To this end, there will also be an exchange between doctoral students from Kassel and Madrid. The award thus strengthens the establishment of a Spanish-German network.

On February 6, 2025, the Faculty will hold a colloquium on the occasion of the research stay, at which Bañares will give a lecture on "How to manipulate ultrafast chemical reactions with strong laser fields".

More information on the Humboldt Research Award: https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/bewerben/foerderprogramme/humboldt-forschungspreis

Press contact:

Sebastian Mense
University of Kassel
Communication and Marketing
Phone: +49 561 804-1961
E-mail: presse[at]uni-kassel[dot]de
www.uni-kassel.de