Maria Antonietta Loi: New Director of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials

Effective January 1st, 2027, Prof. Maria Antonietta Loi will succeed Prof. Moniek Tromp as Scientific Director of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials.

Prof.dr. Maria Antonietta Loi

Maria Antonietta Loi studied physics at the University of Cagliari, Italy, where she earned her PhD in 2001 for her thesis on Photoexcitations and Interchain Interactions in Conjugated Oligomers and Polymers, conducted under the supervision of Prof. G. Bongiovanni and A. Mura. In 2001, she joined the Linz Institute for Organic Solar Cells at the University of Linz, Austria, as a postdoctoral fellow. She later worked as a researcher at the Institute for Nanostructured Materials of the Italian National Research Council in Bologna, Italy.

In 2006, she became an Assistant Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen. She now serves as a Full Professor and Chair of the Photophysics and OptoElectronics Group. Her research focuses on unraveling the physical properties of novel semiconductors and tuning their characteristics to fabricate high-performance optoelectronic devices, such as solar cells, LEDs, and photodetectors. She has published over 340 peer-reviewed articles in these fields.

Prof. Loi has previously contributed to the Zernike Institute as a board member (2014–2017) and chair of the board (2017–2020). She also served as Head of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Department at University College Groningen (2015–2017) and is currently a member of the executive board of the Dutch Physics Council (since 2023). She is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Physics Letters and serves on the international advisory boards of leading journals, including Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, and ACS Materials Letters.

Her achievements include prestigious grants such as the ERC Starting Grant (2013) and ERC Advanced Grant (2022) from the European Research Council. She has been recognized with the Minerva Prize (2011) from the Dutch Research Council and the Physicaprijs (2018) from the Netherlands Physical Society. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2020), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, 2022), the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC, 2022), the Royal Society of Chemistry (2022), the Materials Research Society (2025), and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2026).

Vision for the Directorship

Prof. Loi’s vision for the Zernike Institute emphasizes social and scientific cohesion, fostering collaboration, transparency, and a shared sense of purpose. She plans to create spaces for scientific interaction and social activities to unify and motivate the institute. Operationally, she aims to streamline processes, optimize support distribution, and involve all members in decision-making to enhance transparency and efficiency.

Contact

https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.a.loi/