Eleftherios Goulielmakis awarded the Advanced Grant from the European Research Council

Rostock, Germany: Professor Eleftherios Goulielmakis of the University of Rostock, a renowned scientist in the physics field of ultrafast science, has been chosen by the European Research Council to receive an Advanced Grant for his project Ultrafast Picoscopy of Solids. The ERC Advanced Grant is one of – if not the - most prestigious and highly competitive research grants in Europe. It is awarded to established scientists with a significant track record and impact in their respective field of research. Goulielmakis’ project is one of 218 projects the European Research Council selected for funding this year. Endowed with €2.5 million, the grant will support Professor Goulielmakis’ group to conduct high-risk, high-gain research at the interface of ultrafast science and microscopy. “I am thrilled by this fantastic news, and I am thankful to the ERC for selecting our project for this grant” says Goulielmakis. “Using this grant, we plan to pursue research towards the detailed visualization of atomic and electron motion in ordinary and correlated materials”, he adds. “We anticipate the technique and the results of this endeavour to yield benefits to a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines – from physics and quantum chemistry to material science and information technology” he concludes. Goulielmakis has been a professor of physics at the University of Rostock since 2018. As of 2023, he has also served as an external member of the governance council of the University of Ioannina, Greece. Previously (2010-2018), he has worked at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum optics in Garching, Germany, leading a research group on attosecond electronics. Goulielmakis is best known for his work on attosecond physics, in particular the first direct measurement of the electric field of light waves using the attosecond streaking technique. Using light-field synthesis, his group is the first to have created optical attosecond pulses, a method and tool which can be used to conduct research at the frontiers of ultrafast science and microscopy. Prior to receiving the ERC Advanced Grant, Professor Goulielmakis has been awarded the Georgios Foteinos Prize of the Academy of Athens in 2007, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist Prize in Optics of the International Commission for Optics in 2009, the Gustav Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society (DPG) in 2013, and the Röntgen Prize of the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen in 2015.