Core Academy Secretariat staff recently visited Lanzhou University and held a meeting with our new Fellow, Prof. Herbert Gleiter.

During the meeting, our members discussed and exchanged views with Prof. Herbert on a range of issues, including the subsequent development of our organization, international cooperation and collaborations, the nomination of new fellows, and the enhancement of interactions with our members and academic partners. Finally, Dr. Lei Li represented the academic committee to present Professor Gletier with his fellowship certificate and golden pin badge.

Herbert Gleiter is a material scientist. He received his Ph.D. in Physics and was a Post Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and MIT. In 1973, Gleiter became Chair Professor of Materials Science and founded in 1988 today’s Leibniz Institute of New Materials at Saarbruecken, Germany. In 1994, he was appointed President of Research and Technology of the Research Center Karlsruhe, Germany, and 4 years later he became the Founding Director of the Center’s Institute of Nanotechnology. In 2012 the University of Nanjing founded the “Herbert Gleiter Institute of Nanoscience” and appointed him as the Institute’s Founding Director. Prof. Gleiter’s received more than 40 prizes. Among them the most highly reputated awards in Germany, the Leibniz and the Max Planck Research Prize and the Cothenius Medal, the most prestigious award of the German National Academy of Sciences. Seven universities awarded him honorary doctorates. He is a Member of 12 Academies of Science and/or Engineering. By the end of the 70’s he and his research group opened the way to a new kind of materials, called today nano-crystalline materials. In fact, today more than 800 papers are published annually in this area of Materials Science and about 6 to 8 international conferences on nano-materials are organized every year. One of his pioneering papers on nano-crystalline materials has been cited so far more than 4000 times. 

In recent years, Herbert Gleiter expanded the field of Materials Science by developing nanostructured non-crystalline materials that are called today nano-glasses. Nano-glasses can be produced with atomic structures and/or with chemical compositions that cannot be generated in the form of the crystalline materials or in the form of the glassy materials we have today resulting in new properties of nano-glasses. The utilization of these new properties permits the development of new technologies In other words, nano-glasses may open the way into a “glass age” that would be based on the new properties of nano- glasses, similar to the bronze or iron age that were based on the new properties of bronze or iron when they were discovered.

Professor Gleiter was officially elected a fellow of the Core Academy "for his distinguished contributions to the theoretical and practical uses of nanostructured materials".