Leibinger Foundation prize winners honored

Ditzingen, Germany--Winners of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation 2010 Innovationspreis (Innovation Prize) and Zukunftspreis (Future Prize) gathered at Trumpf headquarters last Friday evening together with family, friends, and peers for an evening of recognition and celebration. An international group of about 400 people attended the awards ceremony and reception to witness the presentation of four Innovation Awards and the Future Prize. The event was opened by Dr. Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller, managing director of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation and included presentations by Professor Peter Gruss, president of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science who discussed some of the latest advances in personalized medicine, and science journalist, author, and radio presenter Gabor Paal. Members of the panel of judges presented the prizes.

First prize was awarded to Professor Thorsten Trupke and Dr. Robert Bardos from the University of New South Wales and BT Imaging Pty Ltd (Australia) for their development and commercialization of a laser-based luminescence imaging system for noncontact inspection of the silicon bricks and wafers used in solar cells.

Joint second prizes were awarded. A team from Coherent GmbH (Göttingen, Germany) and Bruker HTS GmbH (Alzenau, Germany) was recognized for its work with UV excimer lasers and pulsed laser deposition for mass production of ceramic high-temperature superconducting tapes that are used in power distribution cables for so-called Smart (electrical) Grids; and Professor Karsten König of JenLab GmbH and the Universität des Saarlandes (Saarbrücken) received his award for clinicalin vivo non-invasive multiphoton tomography of human skin. Third prize went to Professor Majib Ebrahim-Zadeh of the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) and Radiant Light S.L. (Barcelona, Spain) for his successful development and commercialization of a tunable femtosecond light source whose output spans from 250 to 2500 nm.

The Zukunftspreis was awarded to Professor Federico Capasso of Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) for his work in quantum-cascade lasers (QCLs). After the presentation, Capasso, who was accompanied at the ceremony by his wife and one of his daughters, gave a short review of QC technology and how the lasers are finding many new applications. He also acknowledged the contributions of many of his colleagues and students including Professor Jérôme Faist (now head of the Quantum Optoelectronics Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) and Professor Claire Gmachl (now at Princeton University, USA).

For more information and details about the winners visit the Berthold Leibinger Foundation website