New Humboldt Laureates at LMU

The research of German-American historian Andreas Daum has had a significant impact on our understanding of transatlantic exchange and transfers in the realms of politics, culture and science. His most influential works deal with the history of popular science, John F. Kennedy and Berlin during the Cold War era, and emigrés from the Third Reich who went on to become historians after 1945. Daum currently focuses on the life and thinking of Alexander von Humboldt. His brief biography of this 19th-century naturalist and early globalizer was published by C.H. Beck in 2019. During his stay at LMU, Andreas Daum and Margit Szöllösi-Janze will collaborate on topics of mutual interest in the fields of biography and the history of science.Professor Andreas Daum studied in Cologne, Munich and the USA, and obtained his doctoral degree from the LMU in 1995. His mentors included Thomas Nipperdey, Gerhard A. Ritter and Laetitia Boehm. He held positions in Munich and at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, and was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University. Since 2002, Daum has been teaching as Professor of Modern History at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among others. Andrey Rogach is an internationally renowned expert in the fields of Materials Science and Nanotechnology. His research interests focus on light-emitting nanomaterials, in particular semiconductor quantum dots. He has published many research papers on the synthesis, characterization and application of semiconductor nanoparticles and on optical spectroscopic studies of light-emitting nanomaterials. At the City University of Hong Kong he has synthesized a number of novel materials, including quantum dots that emit light in the infrared region of the spectrum, carbon dots, and perovskite nanocrystals and continues to explore their potential for applications in solar cells, lighting and displays. During his stay at LMU, he and Jochen Feldmann will carry out a collaborative project with the aim of developing colloidal nanomaterials based on carbon that exhibit enhanced photoluminescence in the red and infrared, which could find use in various imaging procedures.Born in Belarus, Andrey Rogach received his doctorate in Chemistry from the Belarusian State University in Minsk in 1995. Following a stint as a postdoc at Hamburg University, he took up a position at LMU in 2002, and completed his Habilitation at the Physics Department in 2009. In that same year, he joined the City University of Hong Kong, where he was appointed as Founding Director of the Center for Functional Photonics. Since 2012, he has held the Chair of Photonics Materials there.