Associate Professor Katharina (Tinka) Marquardt

Katharina Marquardt joined St Edmund Hall and the University of Oxford on 1 September 2023 as Associate Professor of Materials. She additionally holds a visiting Reader position at Imperial College London. Her expertise ranges from “Experimental Geology“ to “nanoscale properties of materials” and particularly “grain boundaries, their distributions and properties” – critical to increasing the performance of materials for the energy transition.

She was a visiting researcher in the materials science department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, and at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), Berkeley, USA. In the former institute, she worked on advanced electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) techniques for grain boundary characterization to enable comprehensive studies of how these interfaces alter material properties. At NCEM she characterised the transport properties of grain boundaries on the nm scale for advanced laser ceramics and diffusion in Earth materials.

Katharina’s research spans a wide range of challenges related to interfaces such as grain and phase boundaries in crystalline materials, from chemistry and physics to statistics of interface distributions and their adaptation during changing physical conditions. Katharina combines experiments, state-of-the-art characterisation, and theory to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the role of interfaces in geological and man-made materials for extreme condition applications as well as for the energy-transition.

Katharina’s recent focus has been on addressing fundamental scientific challenges that enable the design of new materials by tailoring their grain boundary populations and possibly accelerating our transition to a net-zero carbon society. Examples include (i) the role of interfaces to tailor interface properties, (ii) the role of grain boundaries in hard materials and materials for cladding in nuclear fusion reactors (iii) but also interfaces and their role in element partitioning in rocks. Katharina’s research group furthermore works on designing new microstructures to enhance Na-Ion battery durability and performance, and (iv) develop new protocols for comprehensive characterization of the distribution of interfaces.