Topological Insulators: Fundamentals and Perspectives

Frank Ortmann is Head of the Computational Nanoelectronics group at the Institute for Materials Science at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. He is specialized on large-scale electronic transport simulations linked with ab initio electronic structure methods and on nanoelectronics of materials. Frank Ortmann studied physics at the University of Jena, Germany, where he received his PhD for a work on the topic of charge transport in organic crystals in 2009. He moved to the French Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives Grenoble, France, for a postdoctoral stay funded by a Marie Curie fellowship from the European Commission. In 2011, he moved to the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology Barcelona. Frank Ortmann was awarded with the Faculty Prize of the University of Jena, received a prestigious Emmy Noether Young Investigator grant from the DFG in 2014 and is author of several articles in high-impact journals.

Stephan Roche is an ICREA Research Professor and Head of the group Theoretical and Computational Nanoscience at the Institut Catala de Nanociencia i Nanotecnologia (ICN2) in Barcelona, Spain. He studied Theoretical Physics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, France, where a received his PhD after completion of his thesis at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in 1996. After several postdoctoral fellowships at universities in Japan, Spain, and Germany he was appointed Professor at the Joseph Fourier University, France, and became researcher at the French Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives in 2004. He has published more than 130 scientific contributions, is member of various international nanotech conference committees and Head of the ICN2 in the Graphene Flagship initiative of the European Commission. In 2009, Stephan Roche was awarded with the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Sergio O. Valenzuela is an ICREA Research Professor and Head of the group Physics and Engineering of Nanodevices at the Institut Catala de Nanociencia i Nanotecnologia (ICN2) in Barcelona, Spain. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2001. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he became a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, then moved to Barcelona in 2008. Valenzuela is interested in quantum computation, NEMS and superconductivity and has ample experience in the characterization of spintronic devices. He is editor of one book and several book chapters and author of more than 40 journal articles. In 2009, Sergio O. Valenzuela was honored with the Young Scientist award of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and, in 2012, received a highly renowned European Research Council Starting Grant.