Herbert Gleiter Made Fellow of Materials Research Society:

Physicist and materials scientist Prof. Dr emeritus Herbert Gleiter has been elected Fellow of the American Materials Research Society (MRS). The organisation thus pays homage to him for his research on nanomaterials. As early as in the 1980s, he discovered that crystalline materials obtain special characteristics by a high degree of grain and phase boundaries. He was the first to discover the periodic structure of boundaries between differently aligned crystals and on this basis developed the "Structural Unit Model" constituting the basis for present-day models of the atomic structure of grain boundaries. These insights made him a pioneer of nanosciences. From 1994 onward, he was a member of the executive board of the former Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Research Centre Karlsruhe) and in 1998 he founded the Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) together with Nobel Laureate Prof. Dr Jean-Marie Lehn and Prof. Dr Dieter Fenske and served as the institute's director. One of the scientists presently active within the Network of Excellent Retired Scientists (NES) of the KIT, 71-year-old Gleiter shares his knowledge with the younger generation. Gleiter's current work focuses on a novel class of non-crystalline materials, so-called nanoglasses, and investigates the question regarding the transition between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. Throughout his career, Gleiter has received numerous awards, including the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Association in 1988, the Max Planck Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society in 1993, and in 2009 the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences. Amongst other academic honours, he held professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Bochum and at Saarland University.

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