From the witch's kitchen: "Light and matter"

"From Witches Cauldrons in Material Science" - this is the motto under which female scientists from Germany and abroad are gathering in the Harz Mountains. Their fourth Walpurgi meeting will take place on Monday 30 April at the Rammelsberg Museum Mine, a World Heritage Site south of Goslar. The event is organised by the Center of Interface Science (CIS) of the Universities of Oldenburg, Osnabrück and Bremen in cooperation with the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry (DBG) and the Equal Opportunities in Chemistry Working Group (AKCC) of the German Chemical Society (GDCh). Prof Dr Katharina Al-Shamery, chemist and Vice President for Research at the University of Oldenburg, will chair the conference. The Walpurgi meeting brings together women chemists and physicists who are researching questions of materials science - and encourage young scientists to pursue a career in science. They present their projects and research results in three separate forums. The speakers come from universities and institutes in Germany and the Netherlands. They include scientists such as biophysicist Prof Dr Petra Schwille, who received the Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2011 and has been Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich since April. Or Prof Dr Petra Rudolf, Professor of Experimental Solid State Physics at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. She was awarded the European Union's Descartes Prize for transnational research in 2007. Other speakers are Prof. Dr Petra Tegeder (Freie Universität Berlin), PD Dr Karin Fink (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Dr A. Julia Stähler (Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin) and Dr Melanie Schnell (Max Planck Advanced Study Group (ASG) at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL), Hamburg. During the conference, children can take part in an all-day hands-on programme. Please register by 12 April at the conference office with Sabine Szefczyk, University of Oldenburg, by email: or phone: 0448/798-3850.