Professor Claudia Draxl is a distinguished leader in theoretical condensed matter physics with an extensive academic career spanning several decades. She currently holds the position of Einstein Professor for Solid-State Theory at the physics department of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and serves as a Max-Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Graduate Center for Quantum Materials. After completing her studies in mathematics and physics at the University of Graz from 1978 to 1983, she earned her doctorate in theoretical physics from the same institution in 1987 and completed her habilitation there in 1996. Her academic journey progressed through various significant roles including lecturer and associate professor at the University of Graz, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, and university professor at the University of Leoben before her appointment at Humboldt University in 2011.
Dr. Draxl's pioneering research primarily focuses on the theoretical understanding and computational prediction of material properties through advanced ab initio methodologies. Her work centers on density functional theory, many-body theory, and theoretical spectroscopy, with specific applications to electron-phonon coupling phenomena in complex materials systems. She has made substantial contributions to the study of organic and inorganic semiconductors, hybrid materials, nanostructures, and superconductivity, developing fundamental theoretical frameworks that enable accurate prediction of material behaviors. Her research has established critical connections between theoretical models and experimental observations, particularly in the characterization of electronic and optical properties of novel materials.
As the developer of the all-electron full-potential computational package exciting, implementing density-functional theory with a focus on excitations, she has created essential tools widely adopted in the materials science community. She is a founding member of the Novel Materials Discovery Repository, an open-access library of materials science data, and the non-profit FAIR-DI association dedicated to FAIR data infrastructure for materials research. Currently leading the SOLgroup at Humboldt University, her research encompasses organic-inorganic hybrid structures, wide-gap oxides, thermoelectric materials, and solar-cell applications, with a strong emphasis on computational materials design. Her leadership in developing the NOMAD research data ecosystem and the CELL cluster-expansion code continues to transform how materials science data is organized, shared, and analyzed across the global research community.
