Module 2 · A Companion Lecture Series
The Lise Meitner Lectures
The Lise Meitner Lectures are an annual joint event of the German Physical Society (DPG), the Austrian Physical Society (ÖPG), and the Swiss Physical Society (SPS), held alternately in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Established in 2008 to mark Lise Meitner’s 130th birthday, the series invites a leading woman physicist each year to deliver a public lecture and engage in a conversation with younger researchers. The speakers form an extraordinary cross-section of contemporary physics.
Lise Meitner (1878–1968)
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who, with Otto Hahn, discovered nuclear fission in 1938–1939. Forced to flee Berlin in July 1938 because of her Jewish ancestry, Meitner continued the analytical work in Sweden; with her nephew Otto Frisch she correctly interpreted Hahn’s and Strassmann’s experimental result as the splitting of the uranium nucleus, with the energy release computed from Einstein’s \(E = mc^2\). Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — an injustice the field has acknowledged ever since. Element 109 (meitnerium, Mt) is named in her honour.
The Lise Meitner Lectures honour her legacy and explicitly aim to make visible the contributions of leading women physicists. The lectures are publicly recorded and posted by the DPG.
Recent Lectures (2015–2026)
2026 — Michèle Heurs (Gravitational Waves)
Michèle Heurs is a key contributor to the GEO 600 gravitational-wave detector and to the wider LIGO/Virgo collaboration. Her work centres on squeezed-light injection, quantum-noise reduction, and the future generation of ground-based GW interferometers (Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer).
Gravitational-Wave Astronomy — Quo Vadis?
The state of the field after the third LIGO/Virgo observing run, the role of GEO 600 as a quantum-optics testbed, the case for the Einstein Telescope, and where GW astronomy is going by the 2030s.
2025 — Anne L’Huillier (Attosecond Physics)
Anne L’Huillier received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz) for the development of methods that produce attosecond (10⁻¹⁸ s) pulses of light — the first tools fast enough to follow electronic motion in atoms in real time.
Attosecond Pulses for Studying Electron Dynamics
L’Huillier on the discovery of high-harmonic generation, the construction of the first attosecond pulse trains, and the new observational window into electron dynamics in atoms, molecules, and solids.
2022 — Viola Priesemann (Living Neural Networks)
Viola Priesemann (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, Göttingen) studies information processing in biological neural networks, criticality in spiking dynamics, and during the COVID-19 pandemic was a prominent voice on epidemic modelling.
Lernen in lebenden neuronalen Netzwerken
Priesemann on the dynamics of biological neural networks: criticality, branching processes, the trade-off between sensitivity and stability, and what living networks can teach machine learning.
2021 — Claudia Draxl
Claudia Draxl (HU Berlin) is a theoretical solid-state physicist whose group develops first-principles electronic-structure methods for materials prediction (the exciting code, FAIR data principles for materials science).
Lise Meitner Lecture 2021 — Claudia Draxl
Density-functional theory at the cutting edge: many-body Green’s functions, the GW approximation, optical excitations in functional materials, and the FAIR-data movement in computational materials science.
2019 — Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop
Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop (University of Queensland) works on quantum atom optics, optical tweezers, and Bose–Einstein condensates. Her group has produced landmark experiments on persistent currents in superfluid rings and on quantum-vortex dynamics.
Interview with Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop
Conversation on optical trapping, BECs in toroidal traps, quantum vortices, and the trajectory of an Australian atomic-physics group from optical tweezers to controlled superfluidity.
2018 — Nicola Spaldin (Multiferroics)
Nicola Spaldin (ETH Zürich) predicted the existence of room-temperature multiferroics — materials that are simultaneously ferroelectric and ferromagnetic — and identified BiFeO3 and several manganite systems as realisations. The class is now central to spintronics and to memory-device research.
Lise Meitner Lecture 2018 — Nicola Spaldin
The discovery of multiferroics, the ‘d⁻ndash;n’ mechanism for combining magnetism and ferroelectricity, BiFeO₃ as the room-temperature flagship, and the quest for new applications in low-energy computing.
Interview with Nicola Spaldin
2017 — Johanna Stachel (Heavy-Ion Physics)
Johanna Stachel (Heidelberg) is a leader of the ALICE experiment at the LHC, studying the quark–gluon plasma created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. With Peter Braun-Munzinger she pioneered the statistical-hadronisation model that successfully predicts particle yields at freeze-out.
Lise Meitner Lecture 2017 — Johanna Stachel
The quark–gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC: hydrodynamic flow signatures, jet quenching, charm-quark thermalisation, and the statistical-hadronisation prediction of particle yields.
Interview with Johanna Stachel
2016 — Petra Schwille (Biophysics)
Petra Schwille (MPI of Biochemistry, Martinsried) leads the bottom-up synthetic biology programme aiming to construct a minimal cell from purified components, and has done foundational work on giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs)and Min protein oscillations as a paradigm of biological self-organisation.
Lise Meitner Lecture 2016 — Petra Schwille
Bottom-up biology: GUVs as minimal cells, the Min protein oscillator that finds the cell midplane, and the long road toward reconstituting cell division and gene expression in vitro.
Interview with Petra Schwille
2015 — Cornelia Denz (Photonics & Singular Optics)
Cornelia Denz (Münster, then PTB) works on nonlinear photonics, structured light, and singular optics — engineering optical fields with controlled vortex content for quantum information and optical manipulation.
Lise Meitner Lecture 2015 — Cornelia Denz
Structured light, optical vortices, and singular optics: how engineered phase singularities and orbital-angular-momentum modes provide new tools for sensing, communication, and biomedical optics.
Interview with Cornelia Denz
Source: Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft — lectures and interviews are produced and recorded by DPG and posted on the official DPG YouTube channel.