Elena Hassinger

Elena Hassinger (born 1982) is a German physicist and professor at the Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden).^[1] She is known for her work on quantum materials and low temperature physics.

Career

Hassinger studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, and graduated with a Diplom (German degree similar to a Masters) in 2007. She then did graduate studies in the group of Jacques Flouquet at the University of Grenoble and French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.^[2] She was awarded a PhD in 2010 with a thesis entitled "Competition of ground states in URu2Si2 and UCoGe".^[3] She then moved to Canada, and worked as a postdoc in the group of Louis Taillefer at the Université de Sherbrooke until 2014.^[2]

Hassinger returned to Germany as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI CPfS) in Dresden. In 2021, her group reported the discovery that CeRh2As2 was a superconductor with two superconducting states.^[4][5] In 2016, she was appointed to a tenure-track professorship for “Quantum Materials - Experimental Solid State Physics” at the Technical University of Munich while maintaining her earlier position as part of the “MaxPlanck@TUM” collaboration.^[6]

In 2022, she was appointed to a new professorship, as the Chair of Low Temperature Physics of Complex Electron Systems at the Institute of Solid State and Materials Physics at TU Dresden.^[2] The professorship was established as part of the Excellence Cluster ct.qmat (Complexity and Topology in Quantum Materials), in which Hassinger is also Principal Investigator.^[7][8] Since 2023, she has been a sub-project leader for the topic “Transport properties of itinerant frustrated and topological magnets” at the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1143 on “Correlated Magnetism: From Frustration to Topology”.^[9]

In 2023, Hassinger was awarded a €2.7 million ERC Consolidator Grant for her project “Exotic Quantum States by Locally Broken Inversion Symmetry in Extreme Conditions—Ixtreme.”.^[2][10][11] The project aims to continue working with CeRh2As2 to test for the existence of topological surface states, which would have implications for quantum computing.^[10]

Academic diversity

In 2019, Hassinger was a co-author of a paper entitled "A Leak in the Academic Pipeline: Identity and Health Among Postdoctoral Women".^[12] She then developed and taught a seminar called "The Big Bang Theory syndrome: Why should we care about stereotypes?", which examined gender stereotypes, and how they affect scientific careers, behavior and perception. For this seminar, she was acknowledged with an award for diversity-sensitive teaching from TU Dresden.^[13][14]