Topological Insulators

Frank Ortmann is Head of the Computational Nanoelectronics group at the Institute for Materials Science at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. He is specialized on large-scale electronic transport simulations linked with ab initio electronic structure methods and on nanoelectronics of materials. This includes Topological Insulators, 2D Materials and Organic Semiconductors. Frank Ortmann was awarded with the Faculty Prize of the University of Jena, received a Marie Curie individual fellowship from the European Commission and in 2014 he received a prestigious Emmy Noether Young Investigator grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He is author of several articles in high-impact journals.

Stephan Roche is an ICREA Research Professor and Head of the group Theoretical and Computational Nanoscience at the Institut Catala de Nanociencia i Nanotecnologia (ICN2) in Barcelona, Spain. He is a theoretician with more than twenty years of experience concerning the study of transport theory of low-dimensional systems, including graphene and topological insulators. His current research activities focus on the exploration of fundamental properties of spin transport phenomena in Dirac Matter, and searching practical solutions to engineer spin manipulation technologies based on these unique materials. S. Roche has been awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize by the Alexander Von-Humboldt Foundation (Germany) in 2009, and since 2011, he is engaged in the Graphene Flagship project, currently as a co-leader of the Graphene spintronics workpackage.

Sergio O. Valenzuela is an ICREA Research Professor and Head of the group Physics and Engineering of Nanodevices at the Institut Catala de Nanociencia I Nanotecnologia (ICN2) in Barcelona, Spain. He is an experimental physicist with more than fifteen years of experience in condensed matter research covering a broad range of topics from superconductivity and quantum computation to nanoelectromechanical systems and spin electronics. His current research interests focus on the thermal, thermoelectric, and spin-transport properties of 3-dimensional topological insulators and of 2-dimensional materials, such as graphene. In 2009, he was awarded the Young Scientist Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and, in 2012, received a European Research Council Starting Grant.