The lab:

© 2023 TUD

The Dresden Center for Intelligent Materials is an independent lab settled at TU Dresden. It is founded with the purpose of establishing complementary competencies and developing promising future research areas.

The Lab funds young and ambitious investigators towards interdisciplinary research at breakthrough scientific areas. It initially consists of two interdisciplinary research teams, Hierarchical Topologies and Materials Informatics, supported by mentors and various associated researchers from TU Dresden and abroad. We are teams with flat hierarchies and an open, startup-like atmosphere. Our mission is to push the limits of material sciences and engineering by synergizing methods from other disciplines. We are committed to open science and transparency. Join us on our journey!

The Gartner cycle of scientific careers:

© 2021 TUD

The DCIM helps young talents in an acceleration phase to bridge the gap between early-stage postdoc phase and the professorship.

News and stories:

New year with DCIM

The lab is growing.

Adrian Ehrenhofer

On January 12th, the DCIM members met at the Chair of Nanotechnology at the main campus to celebrate the new year and discuss new scientific cooperation opportunities: This year, there will be DCIM Seed Grants, which help building up cooperation between the members. More details will be discussed on February 2nd, the DCIM Pitch Day, where the scientists will present their scientific background and cooperation interests to each other. Stay tuned!

Minghao Yu got an ERC Starting Grant

New funding for an excellent young researcher at DCIM

Adrian Ehrenhofer

Congratulations to our member Minghao Yu who won a prestigious ERC Starting Grant. With his new project "BattSkin" (Practical magnesium batteries enabled by 2D crystalline polymer-based artificial electrode skins), he will conduct research on sustainable magnesium batteries.

Adrian Ehrenhofer

Congratulations to our member Mariana Medina-Sánchez who has been appointed as TU Dresden Young Investigator at the Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus. The Young Investigator status strengthens excellent, independent junior research group leaders by fostering their integration into the TU Dresden faculties and offering a qualification program tailored to their particular needs. Mariana is leading the DRESDEN-concept Research Group "Micro- and Nano-Biosystems“ which aims at designing and developing microtools that interface biological samples at the cellular and molecular levels, for both fundamental studies and healthcare applications, in particular in the field of assisted reproduction and targeted drug delivery. Such microtools range from medical microrobots to smart sensor-actuator systems, made employing cutting-edge microfabrication technologies and functional nanomaterials. The DRESDEN-concept research group was formed jointly between the B CUBE – Center for Molecular Bioengineering at TU Dresden and the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW).

DCMS DCIM DDc International Summer School 2023

Data-driven exploration and design of materials

Adrian Ehrenhofer
© 2023 © TU Dresden

New and optimized materials are the key for a sustainable future. These materials are developed more and more in a multidisciplinary context. The paradigm of data-driven materials exploration combines and bundles the insights from different fields, such as chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering.
The new Research Training Group 1868 "Data-Driven Design of resilient meta materials" (D³) aims at realizing a fully digital, data-driven approach to design meta-materials for the sectors of energy, medicine and mobility. Together with the Dresden Center for Materials Science (DCMS) and the Dresden Center for Intelligent Materials (DCIM), we organize this year's joint summer school from Monday August 21st to Thursday August 24th 2023 in Dresden.
Internationally renowned speakers from D³, DCMS, DCIM and from abroad will present their perspectives in a 5-day workshop in the spectrum of data-driven design of materials and structures. The program will be enriched with hands-on training on big-data models, as well as lab visits at our partner institutes and the TU Dresden. The application deadline is over and the invitations mails are being sent out the next days. Thank you for all your great applications!

Find out more!

Seminar Announcement

Prof. R. Mark Bradley (Colorado State University)

Adrian Ehrenhofer

Nanoscale Self-Organization Induced by Ion Bombardment of Solid Surfaces

Bombarding a solid surface with a broad ion beam can produce a remarkable variety of self-assembled nanoscale patterns, including ripples and hexagonal arrays of nanodots. The emergence of these patterns is not just fascinating – in the future, ion bombardment could prove to be an important tool in the fabrication of nanostructures. The anisotropic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (AKS) equation is commonly used to model nanoscale surface ripples produced by oblique-incidence ion bombardment. Intriguing phenomena are observed that are not reproduced by this model, however. Dispersive effects are not included in the AKS equation, but our simulations show that they can lead to the formation of raised and depressed triangular patches traversed by ripples. These patches bear a strong resemblance to nanostructures that are often observed in experiments. We have also introduced an equation of motion that differs from the AKS equation by the inclusion of a cubic nonlinearity. This additional nonlinear term results from an improved approximation to the sputter yield and can have a crucial influence on the dynamics – it can lead to the formation of a terraced topography, in accord with experimental observations for high ion incidence angles. The rapid variation in the slope at the edge of a terrace results from the formation of a non-classical shock that violates the Lax entropy condition.

The seminar will be held on Wednesday, 21.09.2022 at 09:00 - 10:00 a.m. in Z21 (Zellescher Weg 21), Room 250 and virtual via Zoom.

DCIM Summer School 2022

Dimensions of Intelligence in Materials

Adrian Ehrenhofer
© 2021 © Dresden Marketing GmbH

The DDc Summer School "Dimensions of Intelligence in Materials" -- organized by our team at DCIM -- was held from August 22nd to 25th and was a great success. Three days of talks, lab visits and getting together with speakers and participants from all over the world are over. Thanks to everyone who contributed and participated! We are looking forward to meeting you all again! Find out more!

DCIM TransCampus meeting successful

First meeting between DCIM and TransCampus

Adrian Ehrenhofer

The transCampus workshop on May 6th was a great success: 28 participants of TU Dresden and King's College London met to discuss new cooperation opportunities and common research interests. We are looking forward to the new initiatives that will be created based on this meeting.

Announcement DCIM TransCampus meeting

First meeting between DCIM and TransCampus

Adrian Ehrenhofer

On 6 May 2022, a virtual workshop co-organized by DCIM and transCampus will give researchers the opportunity to connect and to develop new project ideas.

Materials Research has been a column of the London-Dresden partnership for several years, when the Thomas Young Center in London and the Dresden Center for Computational Materials Science (DCMS) joined the transCampus by signing a Memorandum of Understanding.

We invite colleagues from TU Dresden and King's College to present their research in "elevator pitches". In these short presentations, scientists from London and Dresden share their project ideas, looking for (more) partners to join. Interested researchers working in material science or related fields (such as physics, chemistry, mechatronics etc.) are welcome to attend!

The workshop is taking place on Friday, 6 May, from 3 pm to 5 pm (German time) via Zoom. If you would like to attend, please register by sending a message to dcim@tu-dresden.de

transCampus supports this event providing an immediate grant for two joint projects of 8,000 EUR each.

We welcome new Researchers at DCIM

The Research Groups are now complete.

Adrian Ehrenhofer

We are very happy that the researchers at the MatInf and HiTop group started their work!

In the MatInf group, Dipl.-Ing. Yawen Wang joined our group as a PhD student in the field of data-driven identification of material parameters of active/intelligent materials. She received her Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the TU Dresden in cooperation with Robert Bosch GmbH France and previously worked on the simulation and design of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators.

We also welcome Dr. Tzortzinis as a Post-Doctoral researcher to the DCIM in the HiTop group. Dr Tzortzinis received his Diploma in Civil Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece, his M.Sc. degree from Swansea University, UK, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. He has experience in computational modelling and experimental testing in the fields of composite materials, bioengineering and aging structures.

Find out more!

First grant for DCIM

We congratulate Dr. Maria Lißner

Adrian Ehrenhofer

Everybody at DCIM is elated: the first grant for DCIM! Maria Lissner’s application for the Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellowship was successful. The decision was announced last week by the TU Dresden Graduate Academy. The Maria Reiche Program by the TU Dresden Graduate Academy is a long-term funding for up to two years. The Fellowships support excellent female postdocs in their intention to independently acquire a third-party funded project in order to qualify for a scientific career at the TU Dresden with the goal of becoming a professor. Many congratulations to Maria on this brilliant accomplishment.

Adrian Ehrenhofer

We welcome Dipl.-jur. Insa Malberg as the new project coordinator. As the former coordinator of the DFG Resesarch Training Group 1865 "Hydrogel-based microsystems" she has a profound expertise in managing a growing team of young people. We are very happy to have her on board!

We also thank our previous coordinator, Dipl.-phys. Florian Pump, for helping us through the starting phase of the lab.

We hire!

Join us on our common journey!

Adrian Ehrenhofer
© 2021 TUD
The newly established Lab Dresden Centre for Intelligent Materials (DCIM) offers 2 Research Associate positions in the

starting at the next possible date and limited until 31.12.2022! Contact us if you want to know more and apply now!

Update (11.03.2021): The hiring process is finished! We received ~50 applications from all over the world. Thank you very much to everyone for the great interest! We are looking forward to starting the interviews in the next weeks. The Dresden Center for Intelligent Materials will go on growing, so please stay tuned for new opportunities, we are looking forward to hearing from you!

Adrian Ehrenhofer

© 2021 PantherMedia

The research group Materials Informatics - data-driven approaches for materials research started its work today on February 1st, 2021. Our main goals are:

  • ... to identify and classify active (smart/intelligent) materials and structures.
  • ... to find and visualize data for various active materials.
  • ... to investigate material-mediated transfer of information between physical fields.

If you like to know more, please don't hestitate to contact us!

Angelos Filippatos

© 2021 PantherMedia

The goal of the research group Hierarchical Topologies – Intelligent Systems with material-inherent functions is to develop:

  • Select suitable multifunctional materials and integrate them in technically relevant applications
  • Design novel hierarchical structural topologies to adapt and transfer material-level effects to the system level.
  • Develop topologies with distributed compliance on a macroscale to achieve large deformations and high forces while considering the resulting dynamics

If you are interested in our activities contact us!