The international team of the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung conducts advanced basic materials research related to the fields of sustainability, energy, digitalisation, mobility, infrastructure and medicine. We focus on nanostructured metallic materials as well as semiconductors and analyse them down to their atomic and electronic scales. This enables us to develop new, tailor-made and more sustainable structural and functional materials, embracing their responsible synthesis and processing, atomic-scale characterization and properties, as well as their response in engineering components exposed to harsh, real operating environments.

The dynamic structure of the institute and the very intensive cooperation between the departments and researcher teams worldwide are ideally suited to provide answers to the currently emerging global issues of CO₂-reduced and sustainable production and manufacturing, the complete conversion of energy supply and automotive drive technology, the synergies between machine learning and materials research and production, and the need for new high-performance materials for safety, weight-reduced transport and functional innovations based on excellent basic research.