Materials for extreme heat: US researcher Gianola heads to Freiburg as Bessel awardee
Materials scientist Daniel Gianola of UC Santa Barbara receives the Fraunhofer-Bessel Research Award worth 45,000 euros and will work at Fraunhofer IWM and KIT from November.
Archive image · Photo: JoyOfMolybdenum / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
US materials scientist Daniel Gianola of the University of California, Santa Barbara, is coming to Germany as a guest researcher. He is receiving the Fraunhofer-Bessel Research Award, which is granted jointly by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and carries 45,000 euros. The Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM announced this on Tuesday. The award honours his work on the mechanical properties of structural materials and on in-situ methods for examining materials directly while they are under load.
From November 2026 to July 2027, Gianola will work at Fraunhofer IWM in Freiburg and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). There he plans to develop micromechanical techniques supported by machine learning. The goal is fully automated analysis of the large volumes of data produced by modern direct electron detectors. The focus is on structural materials, especially those for high temperatures. At KIT, the research will track how dislocations move through a material and how it deforms.
Gianola was previously a Humboldt fellow at KIT and later worked at the University of Pennsylvania before building his research group in Santa Barbara. His fields include high-strength alloys for extreme environments and data-driven materials discovery. He is also to contribute to NFDI-MatWerk, an initiative on materials data management coordinated by Fraunhofer IWM. IWM director Peter Gumbsch said the institute was very much looking forward to welcoming Professor Gianola.