We are pleased to welcome this year's recipient of the Hertha Sponer Award as an invited speaker.
 
The Hertha Sponer Award is awarded to a female scientist for outstanding scientific work in the field of physics. The prize is intended primarily to encourage younger female scientists by publicly honoring them and thus attract more women to physics. The award consists of prize money of 3,000 euros and a certificate.

Dr. Naëmi Riccarda Leo CIC nanoGUNE, San Sebastian, Spain

"For her outstanding contributions to the study and characterization of artificial metamaterials and ferroic systems."

Naëmi Riccarda Leo made fundamental contributions to the development, characterization, and theoretical description of novel magnetic ordering phenomena that occur at the threshold between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. These include coupling processes between domains in materials with simultaneous magnetic and electric ordering, known as multiferroics, as well as correlations in artificial systems known as spin ice.

Naëmi Riccarda Leo studied physics at the University of Bonn and received her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2014. As a postdoctoral researcher, she first worked at the Swiss Paul Scherrer Institute. In 2018, after a stay at the University of Tokyo, she joined the CIC nanoGUNE research center in San Sebastian under the Maria de Maeztu Postdoctoral Program. She is currently working there as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow.