Simone Wiegand
"Towards Smart Applications Using Temperature Gradients"

Position

• Senior Researcher – Research center Jülich, Germany
• Professor –University Cologne, Germany

Education and professional career

Simone Wiegand studied physics at the Uni Bielefeld where she received her diploma in 1988 working on diode pumped solid state laser at the Laser Center in Hannover. She received her PhD from the Uni. Bremen in 1993, studying phase transitions in binary mixtures close the critical point using light scattering methods. In 1994 she got a Feodor Lynen fellowship of the Humboldt foundation and worked at NIST in Gaithersburg (USA) on transport properties of ionic binary mixtures close to the critical point. Back in Germany in 1996, she initialized a project to study transport phenomena in complex fluids. In 1998 she moved to the MPI for Polymer Research where she continued her research on the dynamic of complex fluids developing scattering techniques and headed the service group for polymer analysis. In 2003 she received her habilitation from the Uni. Bremen and joined the group of Jan Dhont at the FZJ. Since 2016, she has had a joint appointment as Professor in the Physical Chemistry department of the University of Cologne and Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Research Interests

Presently the research of Simone Wiegand focuses on the understanding of hydrogen bonds, which are essential for life on earth. She studies transport processes in aqueous systems, which are influenced by changes of the hydration layer, using optical and scattering methods under isothermal conditions and in temperature gradients. In the recent years it has been demonstrated that the transport in a temperature gradient is very sensitive to changes of the hydration layer and can be used to monitor biochemical and pharmaceutical reactions. Additionally, it turned out that the so-called thermophoresis plays an important role in the “origin-of-life” scenario.

ORCID profile:

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6333-1956