Field of Work
One of the key areas of Prof. Sabine Ludwigs’ research is electricity from plastics – meaning electroconductive polymers to be used one day to produce solar cells or as actuators for soft robotics. The professorship in Structure and Properties of Polymeric Materials at the Institute of Polymer Chemistry investigates functional and intelligent polymer materials with optical, electrical and electrochemical functions which can react to external stimuli.
This approach covers the tailored synthesis of new multifunctional polymers and hybrid materials, the investigation and manipulation of relationships between structure and function (e.g. using electrochemistry and mechanical tests) through to applied testing in organic field-effect transistors, organic solar cells and actuators for soft robotics in biomedicine.
Personal Information
Graduate chemist Prof. Sabine Ludwigs was born in Cologne in 1978, studied at the University of Bayreuth, and from 2002 to 2004 completed her PhD in Physical Chemistry. After she worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK, as a postdoc, she was a team leader at the Institute for Macromolecular Chemistry and a leader of the Scale-Up Service Group at the Freiburg Material Research Center of the University of Freiburg from 2006 until 2010. In November 2010, aged only 32, Ludwigs became Professor of Structure and Properties of Polymeric Materials at the Institute of Polymer Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart.
Prof. Ludwigs was a Junior Fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), was awarded an elite scholarship from the Baden-Württemberg “Landesstiftung” foundation, led an Emmy Noether Young Scientists team for the German Research Association (DFG) and had invited professorships at the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, and the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France.
Current research projects include the inter-university research training group GRK2948 “Mixed Ionic-Electronic Transport” with Heidelberg University, in which she acts as co-speaker. Further, she founded together with Prof. Syn Schmitt (University of Stuttgart) and Prof. Martin Giese (University of Tübingen) the interuniversity Center for Bionic Intelligence Tübingen Stuttgart (BITS) which also involves the Max Planck Institutes for Intelligent Systems and Biological Cybernetics.