Professional: As a trained physicist and manager of many years’, Hubert Keiber assesses the funding applications submitted. Image: Empa
Professional: As a trained physicist and manager of many years', Hubert Keiber assesses the funding applications submitted. Image: Empa - Hubert Keiber, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Werner Siemens Foundation, describes why the Board decided to award a 15 million Swiss francs grant to a team of researchers. What was your first thought when you heard about the CarboQuant project? The project came to me via our Scientific Advisory Board, which recommended it to me - or rather to the Foundation Board - as worthy of funding. When I received the application on my desk, I thought to myself - even before I had read it - "Well, graphene, there was a Nobel Prize for it; but what would you want to do that's new, since the topics are largely known and worked on. So what's so special about the project?" Well, the exciting thing about the project is that it's about the geometry of these new graphene materials, that you can "tune" their electrical and magnetic properties via the geometry of the graphene nanoribbons - and that goes far beyond what has been known so far. So it is the shape that determines the function, and not the chemistry - thus a completely new way of thinking. That really impressed me.
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