We are delighted to congratulate Prof. Mariana Rossi, Principal Investigator of CRC 1772 project A06, on her appointment as Unilever Professor of Molecular Sciences Informatics at the University of Cambridge.

Following her move to the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, Mariana Rossi will conclude her formal involvement in CRC 1772 on 30 September 2026. We are very pleased to see a member of our consortium take this important next step in her academic career.

Mariana Rossi’s career has taken her from studying Physics at the University of São Paulo, to completing a PhD at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford and the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She then led an independent Otto Hahn group at the Fritz Haber Institute, before establishing a Lise Meitner research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg in 2020. She has received recognition for her scientific achievements through the Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein Prize, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2024 and the A06 project in CRC 1772 in 2025.

Within CRC 1772, she has led Project A06 – “Predicting structure and properties of mol2Dmat heterostructures by machine learning.” The project aimed to contribute machine-learning and first-principles approaches to the theoretical description of molecular–2D-material heterostructures.

“Mariana’s appointment is a wonderful achievement and, at the same time, an important success for women in a scientific field in which they continue to be underrepresented,” says CRC 1772 spokesperson Prof. Stephanie Reich. “Independently of this appointment, we are working to build a culture of collaboration, mutual support and openness, in which researchers can develop strong scientific networks and young researchers in particular are encouraged in shaping their own academic careers. For us, the supportive network among the women researchers in the consortium is an important part of this culture.”

While Mariana Rossi’s formal role in CRC 1772 is coming to an end, our scientific collaboration will continue, and we look forward to maintaining close ties with her and her new group in Cambridge.

We warmly congratulate Mariana on this significant career milestone. We also thank her and her PhD student's contributions to CRC 1772.