Thanks to Prof. Jörg Schmalian, we are pleased to have Mareike and Mathias to our upcoming alumni event, where they will share their career insights and advice with KSQM members.

Mareike Hoyer: From solving integrals to solving customer needs 

Mareike studied physics in Marburg and Karlsruhe and focused on condensed matter theory. Her Master’s thesis sparked a keen interest in unconventional superconductivity and the desire to delve deeper. She continued her work on disorder effects in unconventional superconductors in the group of Prof. Dr. Jörg Schmalian, and obtained her PhD in 2017. While Mareike had greatly enjoyed calculating Feynman diagrams with pen and paper as well as publishing and presenting the results, she also realized that she wanted to work on projects with direct practical relevance. In her position as development engineer and project leader at ci-tec – a small software company specializing in solutions for the automation of the process industry – Mareike has expanded her skill set to include infrared camera technology, industrial image processing, machine learning, and software engineering. She coordinates customer projects and joint research projects alongside family life with a toddler.

 Mathias Scheurer: Across the Atlantic and the Alps: An Academic Journey Back to THE LÄND

Mathias grew up in a small town near Heilbronn and studied physics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Early in his studies, he was drawn to the ideas and concepts of theoretical physics and wrote his master thesis in the group of Prof. Shnirman on Majorana qubits. For his PhD from 2013 to 2016, he slightly switched topic and worked on strongly correlated systems with Prof. Schmalian, with a particular focus on unconventional superconductivity. After that, he moved to Harvard University in 2017 as a postdoc to work with Prof. Sachdev, broadening his research interest to also include quantum magnetism and machine learning for physics. In 2020, he got an Assistant Professor position at the University of Innsbruck where he established his research group and then moved to the University of Stuttgart in 2023 as a full professor.