Hakan Ceylan wins the 2020 Günter Petzow Prize

Stuttgart – Dr. Hakan Ceylan, a senior research scientist in the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS, has won the 15th annual Günter Petzow Prize. The prize was awarded at the 2020 Intelligent Systems Summer Colloquium, which was held virtually on Friday, July 24 and which you can watch again here. The Colloquium is an annual public event featuring scientific talks by world-class scientists. At each year’s event, a young MPI scientist is honored with the Günter Petzow Prize for outstanding research in the field of materials science.

At the prize ceremony, MPI-IS Managing Director Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and Prof. Metin Sitti, who heads the Physical Intelligence Department and nominated Ceylan for the prize, praised him for his achievements in developing new design principles, materials, and manufacturing strategies that enable untethered soft robots as small as a single cell. After the prize ceremony, Ceylan held a talk on potential medical applications of microscopic robots that he develops. He stressed that these robots could one day revolutionize the minimally invasive treatment of diseases and targeted drug delivery. He expressed his feeling about the prize as an encouraging recognition for his research and an incentive to achieve greater milestones to enable such wireless microscopic devices in clinics.

“I am very honored to receive the Günter Petzow Prize. Without the support from the team I could never have received this prize. I thank Metin Sitti for supporting my research and for being able to spend many productive years in his department at the MPI-IS. Also a big thank you goes to Ceren Yasa. My postdoc years would not have been as enjoyable and productive without her. Most of the data for my research project was collected together with her,” said Hakan Ceylan, at the prize ceremony. Ceylan’s ultimate aim is to make a lasting contribution to healthcare with miniaturized technologies such as untethered microscopic robots and integrated life-like artificial systems.

Professor Günter Petzow was a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart between 1973 and 1994. He is internationally renowned for his trend-setting research on multicomponent materials. The prize is funded by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and Volkswagen AG.