EPS Council 2018: Petra Rudolf is the next EPS President-elect
Petra Rudolf is the next EPS President-elect. She will take up office as the President of EPS in April 2019, when the term of the current President, Rüdiger Voss, comes to an end.
Petra Rudolf was elected during the Council meeting of the EPS held on 6-7 April 2018 in Paris. The Council delegates listened to inspiring presentations from two candidates. The EPS would like to express its heartfelt thanks to Gloria Platero Coello (Institute of Material Sciences of the CSIC, Madrid) who also stood as candidate for President-elect. Her vision of EPS and projects were impressive.
Petra Rudolf was born in Germany but moved to Italy for her last high school years. She studied Physics at the University of Rome, specialising in Solid State Physics. In 1987 she joined the National Surface Science laboratory in Trieste for 5 years, interrupted by 2 extended periods at Bell Labs, USA, where she worked on the newly discovered fullerenes.
In 1993 she moved to the University of Namur (BE), where she received her PhD and quickly progressed to lecturer and senior lecturer before taking up the Chair in Experimental Solid State Physics at the University in Groningen (NL) in 2003.
From 2014-2018 she was Director of the Graduate School of Science and Engineering in Groningen. Her main research interests concern molecular motors, graphene, organic thin films and inorganic-organic hybrids. She has published more than 200 articles and given more than 70 invited talks at national and international conferences.
She was President of the Belgian Physical Society (2000/01) and elected Fellow of the IoP (2001), Lid van verdienste of the Dutch Physical Society (2006), Fellow of the APS (2010) and member of the German National Academy for Science and Engineering (2016). Her work on molecular motors earned her the 2007 Descartes Prize of the European Commission. In 2013 she was knighted by H.M. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
