Keynote speaker | Professor Petra Rudolf

BIOSKETCH: Petra Rudolf was born in Munich, Germany. She studied Physics at the La Sapienza, University of Rome, where she specialized in Solid State Physics. In 1987 she joined the National Surface Science laboratory TASC INFM in Trieste for the following five years, interrupted by two extended periods in 1989 and 1990/1991 at Bell Labs in the USA, where she started to work on the newly discovered fullerenes. In 1993 she moved to the University of Namur, Belgium where she received her PhD in 1995 and then quickly moved from postdoctoral researcher to lecturer and senior lecturer before taking up the Chair in Experimental Solid State Physics at the University in Groningen in 2003.  Her principal research interests lie in the areas of condensed matter physics and surface science, particularly molecular motors, 2D solids, organic thin films and inorganic-organic hybrids. She has published >270 peer-reviewed articles and 32 book chapters. She has guided 34 MSc and 30 PhD students to the successful defense of their theses and supervised 23 postdoctoral research fellows.

Dr. Rudolf was the President of the European Physical Society 2019/2021 and of the Belgian Physical Society in 2000/2001. She was elected member of the Academia Europea, the German Academy of Science and Engineering and foreign corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, honorary member of the Italian Physical Society, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Lid van verdienste of the Dutch Physical Society and Fellow of the American Physical Society. For her work on molecular motors she received the 2007 Descartes Prize of the European Commission. In 2013 she was appointed officer of the Order of Orange Nassau by H.M. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Prof. Petra Ruddolf was interviewed on the subjet of the impact of bias on researchers' careers for the April 2022 issue of the OMALIUS magazine. 

The full text of the interview as well as a translation in French are available here...