New Helmholtz Young Investigators Groups Selected:

In the course of a strict selection procedure, the Helmholtz Association has confirmed 19 young scientists, who now can develop their own research group at Helmholtz Association centres. With an annual budget of a minimum of 250,000 Euro over five years and the option towards an unlimited employment contract, these posts are the ideal stepping stone towards a scientific career. With its offer of leadership of a Young Investigators Group, the Helmholtz Association has won over, amongst others, eight Young Investigators Groups heads of foreign extraction and has motivated four German scientists to return from abroad, where they had worked at renowned research institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or the Harvard University.

A total of 226 scientists from home and abroad had handed in their applications at the Helmholtz centres, approximately a third of which were women. In the final round of the multiple-stage procedure, ten women and ten men were able to convince the international and interdisciplinary jury both of their research projects and their qualification to head a Young Investigators Group, so that for the first time since the beginning of the programme the share of women amounts to exactly 50 per cent. "The large number of high-class applications shows that these positions as head of a Young Investigators Group are very attractive also in an international context. We thus win over outstanding scientists from across the globe", says Mlynek.

The following heads of Young Investigators Groups were selected:

Dr Evgeny V. Alekseev on the topic of "Actinide Solid State Chemistry - A Direct Link from Fundamental Science to the Safe Management of High-Level Nuclear Waste" at the Research Centre Jülich

Dr Almudena Arcones on the topic of "Core-collapse supernovae: nuclei and matter at the extremes" at the GSI

Dr Malgorzata Borowiak on the topic of "Pluripotent stem cell technology in regenerative medicine" at the MDC

Dr Guoqing Chang on the topic of "Towards Laboratory-Based Ultrafast Bright EUV and X-ray Sources: High-Power Fiber Laser Frequency combs and Cavity Enhanced Ultrafast Optics" at DESY

Dr Andreas Fischer on the topic of "Vascular Signalling and Tissue Homeostasis" at the DKFZ

Dr Hauke Flores on the topic of "Iceflux - Ice-ecosystem carbon flux in polar oceans" at the AWI

Dr Tetyana Galatyuk on the topic of "VIP-QM - Exploring Quark Matter with Virtual Photons" at the GSI/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Dr Anne Hilgendorff on the topic of "Molecular Mechanisms of Bronchopulmonary Dyslplasia" at the Helmholtz Zentrum München

Dr Hugues Lantuit on the topic of "Coastal Permafrost erosion, organic carbon and nutrient release to the Arctic nearshore zone – COPER" at the AWI

Dr Christa A. Marandino on the topic of "TRASE-EC. Trace gas Air-sea exchange using eddy correlation" at the IFM-GEOMAR (as of 2012 the future GEOMAR – Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel)

Dr Matthias Mauder on the topic of "Capturing all relevant scales of biosphere-atmosphere exchange - the enigmatic energy balance closure problem" at the KIT

Dr Martina Müller on the topic of "Oxide Spintronics Laboratory" at the Research Centre Jülich

Dr-Ing. Christian Ott on the topic of "Dynamische Regelung Humanoider Laufmaschinen" at the DLR

Dr Yvonne Peters on the topic of "Approaching the Fundaments of Physics using Top Quarks at LHC" at DESY

Dr Hannah Petersen on the topic of "Dynamical Description of Heavy Ion Reactions at FAIR" at the GSI

Dr Dörte Rother on the topic of "Modular Synthetic Enzyme Cascades" at the Research Centre Jülich

Dr Torsten Sachs on the topic of "Trace Gas Exchange in the Earth - Atmosphere System on Multiple Scales (TEAM)" at the GFZ

Dr Frank Weber on the topic of "Competing Phases in Superconducting Materials" at the KIT

Dr Ilka Weikusat on the topic of "The effect of deformation mechanisms for ice sheet dynamics" at the AWI

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