Stephanie Reich
Full Professor for Physics at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Give Me a Break. A Vision for Research.
When the Berlin wall fell, Stephanie Reich almost got locked up. She attended the Catholic high school in communist East Berlin, and her teachers did not want the teenagers to leave before classes ended. Stephanie was among the first to leave and peeped into the West – where she finally studied physics at Technische Universität Berlin. A fast-moving academic career followed.
After research periods in Barcelona and Cambridge she became a professor at MIT in Boston, only to return this year to Freie Universität Berlin where she became full professor - at the age of 36. At Falling Walls Conference she will not talk about her groundbreaking work on nanotubes but outline a vision for research: What do researchers expect from the institutional framework to facilitate scientific breakthroughs – and what should the Einstein Foundation take care of? Her background promises a lively and clear statement. Besides her international experiences she has a record of being an outspoken person looking beyond the limits of her subject, which seems to be a family tradition. Her parents were among the courageous cofounders of Neues Forum, the civil rights group in East Germany that helped bring down the Wall.
