Bettina V. Lotsch Elected to the Leopoldina
We are honored to announce that Prof. Dr. Bettina V. Lotsch, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and head of the Department of Nanochemistry, has been elected as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Prof. Dr. Bettina V. Lotsch is the director of the department of Nanochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. She has recently been elected to be a member of the academy of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina as a world-recognized expert in her field.
Professor Bettina V. Lotsch is a leading materials scientist whose research focuses on developing advanced materials for sustainable energy technologies and future information systems. Since 2017, she has been Director of the Department of Nanochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and an Honorary Professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Stuttgart and, since 2024, Co-founder and Co-Director of the SolBat Center.
The main areas of her research are focused on molecular and porous materials, including metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a field honored with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, covalent organic frameworks (COFs), carbon nitrides, and other two-dimensional materials. Her team has demonstrated how these highly ordered materials can efficiently absorb sunlight, separate electrical charges, and catalyse chemical reactions, enabling applications such as artificial photosynthesis and solar-fuel production. She has also pioneered approaches that combine energy conversion and storage within a single material, creating systems capable of capturing solar energy and releasing it on demand.
In addition, her contributions have helped establish the field of optoionics, which merges optical and ionic processes in solids and offers promising applications in energy conversion, sensing, data storage, and neuromorphic computing.
Through these achievements, Prof. Dr. Bettina V. Lotsch has helped lay the foundations for next-generation sustainable energy and information technologies.
The Leopoldina
The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is both a traditional scholarly society and a working academy: As the German National Academy of Sciences, the Leopoldina provides independent, science-based advice to policymakers and the public on issues relevant to society. It currently has approximately 1,700 members from more than 30 countries, brings together expertise from nearly all fields of research, and represents German science in international forums. The Leopoldina was founded in 1652 and designated as Germany’s National Academy of Sciences in 2008. As an independent academy of sciences, it is committed to the pursuit of the common good.
