Meet our new coordinator: Maria Longobardi
We welcome our new coordinator Maria Longobardi who has joined the NCCR SPIN team on May 1, 2021. Maria (Marilena) Longobardi earned her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Salerno, Italy, in joint supervision with the University of California, Berkeley, in the group of Mike Crommie in 2010. She explored the local electronic properties of superconductors-magnetic hybrid systems and semiconductor nanoparticles. She worked as a postdoc researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, Italy. In 2011, she moved to the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she focused her studies on the electronic properties of 1D systems at the atomic scale and the atomics defects of 2D materials. In 2016, Maria moved to the Microbiology Department in Geneva, performing interdisciplinary researches on novel hybrid bio-2D materials. In 2020, she rejoined the Department of Quantum Matters Physics at the University of Geneva as a Senior Researcher.
Maria has always been involved in international relations and programs and is also a science journalist. In 2018, she worked at Springer as an editor for the launch of Nature Reviews Physics and is currently the Chief International Relations Officer at the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Science in China.
Since 2012, Maria is serving the American Physical Society (APS) in different leadership roles. In 2016, she founded and led the Forum on Early Career Scientists (FECS) at the APS, becoming one of the largest APS units in a few years. Currently, Maria is serving the APS in the Committee for Informing the Public, the March Meeting Taskforce, and is the Chair-Elect of the Topical Group on Data Science.