2017 Buessem Award 

Rainer Waser received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry at the University of Darmstadt in 1984, and worked at the Philips Research Laboratory, Aachen, until he was appointed Professor at the faculty for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the RWTH Aachen University in 1992 and director of the Institute for Electronic Materials at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, in 1997. He is a member of the Emerging Research Devices working group of the ITRS, and he has been collaborating with major semiconductor industries in Europe, the US, and the Far East. Since 2002, he has been the coordinator of the research program on nanoelectronic systems within the Germany national research centres in the Helmholtz Association. In 2007, he has been co-founder of the Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance, section Fundamentals of Future Information Technology (JARA-FIT). Together with Professor Wuttig, he heads a collaborative research center on resistively switching chalcogenides for future electronics (SFB 917) which comprises of 14 institutes within JARA-FIT and has been funded by the German national science foundation (DFG) since 2011. Among the many awards he has received are the Edward C. Henry Award from the American Ceramic Society (jointly with T. Baiatu and K.H. Härdtl) (1994); the Ferroelectrics Recognition Award 2000 from the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society; the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize of the DFG for his work on the phenomenon of redox-based resistive switching (2014); and the Tsungming Tu Award 2014 by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan (award ceremony April 17th, 2015).  He was awarded RWTH Fellow 2015 by the RWTH Aachen University for outstanding research achievements contributed to the University within the framework of the Excellence Initiative