Fellowship / Fellows

Katharina Al-Shamery

  • 2008–2009
  • Physical Sciences
  • Carl von Ossietzky University (Germany)
Headshot of Katharina Al-Shamery
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Katharina Al-Shamery is a professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. She pursues broad research interests that include surface chemistry, materials science, heterogeneous catalysis, nanocrystal engineering, nanophotonics, femtochemistry, solar energy conversion, and new materials for microelectronic devices.

Al-Shamery will investigate, with Harvard professor Cynthia M. Friend, new systems for chemical solar-energy storage. The project joins Al-Shamery’s expertise in energy partitioning in chemical systems using cutting-edge techniques such as ultrafast laser chemistry with Friend’s expertise in heterogeneous catalysis to lower energy consumption using high-end surface chemical methods.

Al-Shamery studied chemistry at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, and Université Paris-Sud 11, in France. She wrote her PhD thesis in 1979 at ETH in Zürich, Switzerland, in the field of molecular dynamics. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Oxford, in England, she worked on laser-induced surface reactions at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, Germany. While at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, she received the Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein Award of the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft in 1997 and was recognized as one of the outstanding female researchers at the Max Planck Society. In 1997, she became a professor of physical chemistry at the Universität Ulm, in Germany, and in 1999, she became chair in physical chemistry at Oldenburg. She is the founding director of the Center of Interface Science of the universities of Oldenburg, Osnabrück, and Bremen. In 2007, she was elected to the grant selection board of the German science foundation Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

*Fall only

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