Advanced materials contribute significantly in a wide range of applications, from the generation of green hydrogen, to catalysis, energy storage and biomedicine. As such, they are critical to the development and deployment of important future technologies. Often, however, their contribution goes widely unnoticed.
Advanced materials combine different nano- and/or microscale building blocks into hierarchically structured hybrid materials. The combination of different components and the many possible compositions give rise to a complex hazard potential. The aim of the researchers of the Leibniz Research Alliance Advanced Materials Safety is therefore to investigate the safety of advanced materials throughout their entire life cycle.
Using example materials from the fields of energy and biomedicine, guidelines for safe and sustainable advanced materials are created and their effects on human health and environmental organisms are determined. Public perceptions of novel materials will be investigated, which in turn will benefit the researchers themselves for their own communication strategies. The individual projects will be supported by the development of a FAIR-compatible research data infrastructure.
In order to do justice to the complexity of the project, the research network brings together researchers with different areas of expertise: Materials Sciences, Biology and Toxicology, Computer Science, Educational Sciences and Science Communication.
Five doctoral students work on five case studies. They benefit from an interdisciplinary research environment with research stays at different institutes of the alliance and a close exchange between the partner institutes. With a framework program of regular events and workshops, the network promotes additional key competencies of the doctoral students, such as the communication of complex research topics and data management.