Katrin Amann-Winkel
Katrin Amann-Winkel studied Physics at the Technical University Darmstadt and conducted her diploma thesis in the field of solid state NMR on high-pressure ice phases. In 2004 she moved to Austria to continue her research on phase transitions in amorphous ices at the University of Innsbruck. She finished her doctoral studies in 2009 at the Chemistry department and stayed in Innsbruck until 2014 as FWF-Hertha-Firnberg fellow.
Her research was awarded with several grants, as e.g., the Fritz Kohlrausch award from the Austrian Physical Society (ÖPG). November 2014 she moved to Sweden in order to work as researcher at department of Physics at the University Stockholm. Since 2018 she is leading an independent young investigator group funded by Ragnar-Söderbergs-Stiftelse.
Since October 2021 she is employed as Junior Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, supported by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Since October 2021 she also works as a groupleader at MPI for Polymer research.
Research Interests
Water exhibits many fascinating properties which still remain a puzzle. Our research involves fundamental studies on water and its hydrogen-bonded network under extreme conditions. This is, we are interested on water and ice at very low temperatures, high pressures and in connection to soft matter systems or confined geometries.
One of our main interest are the amorphous ices and their phase transitions, as well as supercooled water. Understanding water at such conditions helps also to predict and understand how water interacts with other substances, as for instance single salt molecules or larger biomolecular structures. Modern X-ray scattering methods provide us powerful tools to investigate both static structure and structural dynamics, glass- and phase transitions on different length- and timescales.
In our lab we have several powder diffractometers as well as a small-angle X-ray scattering setup (SAXS). We are also frequent users of large scale facilities, such as synchrotrons or X-ray free electron lasers (XFEL).