Meng Li selected to join the 71st Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Stuttgart/Lindau – Meng Li, who is currently a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physical Intelligence Department at the MPI-IS in Stuttgart, was selected to attend this year’s 71st Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. From 26 June to 1 July, 611 young scientists from 91 countries will be able to meet each other and around 30 Nobel Laureates in person.

“Attending the Lindau Meetings means a lot to me,” says Meng Li. “I get to interact and exchange ideas with some of the greatest minds in science, which is emotionally thrilling and important to me as a researcher. My research background is interdisciplinary, and I am always trying to do something new for every project I choose to work on. I am certain that this conference will bring many brilliant new ideas and inspirations to me to further open up my mind and help connect knowledge from different fields. Also, meeting other selected young scientists helps to reinforce my network which is important for future collaborations.”

Since 1951, the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings has made a name for itself as a unique international scientific forum, enabling exchange between generations, disciplines, and cultures. The theme of the Lindau Meetings alternates between the three Nobel Prize scientific disciplines, Physics, Chemistry or Physiology, and Medicine. It takes place in Lindau, a city located on the north-eastern side of the Bodensee at the German-Austrian-Swiss border. Last year, in 2021, one Nobel Laureate to present his research was Reinhard Genzel, a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics who received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Meng Li’s research is multidisciplinary, involving designing new materials for soft robots and new fabrication strategies for functional micromachines. She works on designing micromachines at the length scale of the width of a hair, protein-based artificial cilia the size of bacteria, and currently, she is focusing on developing adaptive soft magnetic materials to open-up opportunities for self-sustained motions.

Meng Li did her undergraduate study in Biomedical Engineering at Southeast University, China. During her senior year and as an exchange student, she started her advanced materials master's program at the University of Ulm, Germany. After that, she earned her Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Tufts University in Massachusetts, USA. During her Ph.D., Meng Li became very interested in the work of Metin Sitti, who is the Director of the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS. At the end of her graduate study, at a conference, Meng Li met Sitti and was shortly after given the chance to come to MPI-IS to do her postdoctoral research.

“One of my future goals is to become a role model to future generations of female scientists. With all my mentors being male, I realized how few female role models there are for young researchers. I want to be supportive of my future students, mentees, and co-workers. At the end of my career, my h-index doesn’t matter, nor does it matter how many papers I have published; what matters most to me will be how many students’ lives I have positively impacted and how many I have helped along their way to achieve their goals,” Meng Li concludes.

Find out more about the Meeting here.