University Luxembourg

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University of Luxembourg (Uni.Lu), the country’s first and only public university, was founded in 2003 as part of an ambitious national strategy aimed at developing a transition to a knowledge-based economy. Multilingual, international and research-oriented, it is a modern institution with a personal atmosphere. About 56% of its 6400 students are foreign, originating from over 100 different nations. Organized in three Faculties and three Interdisciplinary Centres, Uni.Lu has 2000 employees, 800 PhD candidates under employment contract and 265 assistant/associate/full professors. Education and training are provided within 11 bachelor and 32 master programs as well as three doctoral schools, one covering the disciplines of each Faculty. Since its creation, Uni.Lu has put in place infrastructures to enable its researchers to submit, participate in and coordinate national and international collaborative projects. The central Research Support Department assists at the submission stage, while a group of Research Facilitators works closely with the researchers at their own faculty during the full project cycle (budget management, reporting, etc.). The International Office specializes in ERASMUS+ and other exchange programs and hosts a EURAXESS expert who helps with mobility issues of in/outgoing staff and students.

People

Dr Daniele Brida

Partner leader

Daniele (m) is Full Professor in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics and leads the research group ‘Ultrafast Condensed Matter Physics’ within the Department of Physics and Materials Science at the University of Luxembourg. His scientific career is devoted to the study of ultrafast processes in condensed matter by means of advanced optical technology. In particular, he develops novel ultrafast techniques based on nonlinear optics concepts with the main goal to investigate elementary quantum electronic processes in systems like 2-dimensional layered materials and in confined nanostructures. His activity led to more than 80 publications in major peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics and Physical Review Letters. His current h-index is 32 with more than 3000 overall citations (source: ISI Web of Knowledge). He has also presented several invited talks at international conferences, symposia and academic institutions. He also had the honor to receive the Fresnel prize of the European Physical Society “for the development of broadly tunable few-optical-cycle laser sources and their application in the investigation of primary photo-induced processes in condensed matter systems”.

Alexandre Tkatchenko

co-PI

Alexandre (m) is Full Professor in Theoretical Physics and the Head of the Theoretical Chemical Physics group at the University of Luxembourg. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in computer science and a PhD in Physical Chemistry at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. In 2008−2010, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. Between 2011 and 2016, he led an independent research group at the same institute. Alexandre has given more than 200 invited talks, seminars and colloquia worldwide, published more than 130 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals (h-index=50), and serves on the editorial boards of Physical Review Letters and Science Advances. He received a number of awards, including the Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award of the German Physical Society, and four flagship grants from the European Research Council: a Starting Grant in 2011, a Consolidator Grant in 2017, a Proof-of-concept Grant in 2021 and an Advanced Grant in 2022. His group pushes the boundaries of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and machine learning to develop efficient methods to enable accurate modeling and new insights into complex materials.

Alba Viejo Rodríguez

Alba (f) is a doctoral researcher in the Ultrafast Condensed Matter Physics Group at the University of Luxembourg since March 2021. She studied Physics at the University of Oviedo (Spain). In 2020 she obtained a master in Nanoscience at the University of the Basque Country where she carried out her MSc thesis at CIC nanoGUNE (Spain) about the development of smart substrates to enhance IR near-field spectroscopy. Her research activity focuses on understanding charge and spin dynamics in nanostructured correlated materials by using ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy. In particular, she is now centered on the study of the opto-acoustic response of multi-functional metallic micro-cavities.

Ornella Vaccarelli

Ornella (f) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Theoretical Chemical Physics group at the University of Luxembourg, lead by Prof. Alexandre Tkatchenko. She graduated in April 2014 in Theoretical Physics at the University of Bari (Italy) with a work on the correlation between the components of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain interacting with an external magnetic field. In 2015 she won a research grant at the Physics Department of Bari to study Plenoptic imaging with thermal-light correlations. In September 2018 she obtained a Ph.D. in Physics at IMPMC - Sorbonne University in Paris, where she investigated the exotic properties of a new frustrated two-leg spin ladder, Li2O(CuSO4)2. Her main research activity focuses on the study of the structures and physical properties of various materials, from the micro to the macroscale level. In particular, she is interested in investigating quantum many-body systems through a combined theoretical and numerical approaches in order to predict the collective properties of very large numbers of electrons, atoms or molecules, and discover new principles and phenomena at the multidisciplinary interfaces of physics, chemistry and biology.

Silvia Venditti

Silvia (f) is Research Facilitator at University of Luxembourg since 2018. She studied Environmental Engineering at the University of L’Aquila (IT) and received her PhD degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London (UK). After several R&D positions in both Research and Industry, she decided to focus on research management roles. She currently supports the administrative and financial management of EU projects, including 3 Horizon 2020 (ERC Consolidator Grant, Marie curie ITN and FET OPEN), 1 Interreg NWE, 3 Interreg GR and 2 “Investment for growth and employment” (ERDF).