Team

Anke Weidenkaff is W3-professor for Sustainable Materials Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Her principal areas of research and expertise are materials science and resource strategies, including the development, synthesis and characterization of sustainable materials for energy conversion and storage. Her current work focuses on regenerative circular materials and the development of next-generation green process technologies for fast and efficiently closed material cycles. She completed her PhD degree in Chemistry at ETH Zürich in 1999, received the Venia Legendi for Solid State Chemistry and Materials Science from the University of Augsburg in 2006 and became section head at Empa as well as associated professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

She was chair holder of Materials Chemistry and director of the Institute for Materials Science at the University of Stuttgart from 2013-2018. From 2018 – 2024 she was executive director of the Fraunhofer IWKS in Hanau and Alzenau.

Ms Weidenkaff is an elected board member of the International Society of Solid State Ionics, the executive Board of Materials Valley e.V. and the E-MRS Scientific Council. She was awarded with the Kavli Foundation Lectureship prize in 2011, the Karl Böer Award and the GDCh/GCCCD Award for Excellent Supervisors of Chinese PhD Students in 2022. From 2016 to 2019, she was president of the European Thermoelectric Society (ETS). She served on the expert panel of the German Science Foundation DFG, and the European Research Council (ERC). She was member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) from 2020-2024 and represents the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) in the High Tech Founders Fund (HTFG) committee. She is councilor of various societies and organizations (BAM, Fraunhofer ISE, and FH IAF among others). She holds a honorary professorship of the Southwest Petroleum University in Chengdu China.

Anke Weidenkaff is member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the National Academy of Science and Engineering acatech.