A change of Managing Director: Xinliang Feng takes over from Stuart Parkin

At the institute meeting on 29 June, the institute thanked Stuart Parkin for eight years as Managing Director and welcomed new heads of administration and IT. The day ended with a summer barbecue.

Science needs a lot of managing. That is easy to forget while it is going well: new labs and new instruments do not appear on their own, and nobody writes a paper about the decisions behind them. On Monday, 29 June, the institute took an afternoon to thank the people behind that work, and to change the person in charge of it.

"We would like to celebrate all of you and your contributions in the success of the institute," Stuart Parkin wrote in his invitation.

Eight years as Managing Director

The meeting marked the end of Stuart Parkin's second term as Managing Director. He served eight years in the role over the past ten and a half, from 2016 to 2020 and again from 2023 until this June. He remains director of the NISE department, where his group works on spintronics and Racetrack Memory.

The institute he joined in April 2014 was the first Max Planck Institute founded in the former East Germany, opened in 1992 with three departments. Today it has some 300 coworkers and a new research building: 12,500 square metres and around 70 million euros' worth of labs and offices, and a 700-square-metre cleanroom now being brought into operation. In November 2025, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came to see it.

At the same time, the range of equipment grew. It started with renovated labs. Then came MANGO, the deposition system at the heart of the institute's spintronics research, a dedicated TEM building, an electron-beam lithography writer, a second Bluefors dilution refrigerator, a new UNISOKU scanning tunnelling microscope and a brand-new glovebox cluster for 2D materials. Alongside the hardware came two ERC Advanced Grants and a Racetrack Memory program with Samsung. Since January the institute anchors KOMQUEST, the Korea–Max Planck–PSI Center for Quantum Emergent Spintronics, a five-year collaboration with POSTECH, Seoul National University, the Institute for Basic Science (all three are based in Korea) and the PSI Center for Photon Science (Switzerland).

Half of all NISE doctoral students since 2018 have been awarded their degree with the highest possible grade of summa cum laude.

"I am very proud of the enormous changes and developments in the Institute that all of you have contributed to during this time," Parkin said.

From July 1: Xinliang Feng

Xinliang Feng, director of the institute's Department of Synthetic Materials and Functional Devices (SMFD) since 2021, took over as Managing Director on July 1. He will hold the role for 18 months, until the end of 2027.

Feng came to Halle from TU Dresden, where he held the Chair of Molecular Functional Materials. A materials scientist with roots in chemistry, he leads a department that makes new materials: graphene nanoribbons and two-dimensional polymers, aimed at electronics and energy storage. He is one of the most cited researchers in chemistry and materials science, holder of the 2017 Hamburg Science Award, and in 2024 was elected a full member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Like Parkin, he is an experimentalist. Both directors run laboratories and know from daily experience what it takes to keep them running.

"I am sure that Xinliang Feng will help to further the development and expansion of the Institute," Parkin said.

New faces in administration and IT

The meeting also carried a round of goodbyes and welcomes. Andreas Berger, Head of Administration since November 2011 and long-time Research Coordinator, retired on July 1. We thank him for accompanying us through this long period and for keeping our daily operations running over many years, and we wish him good health and plenty of time for the things he looks forward to.

Kathleen Arendt succeeds him as Head of Administration. She comes from the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology in Halle, where she had led the administration of the Department of Drug Design and Target Validation since 2013. We are glad to have her and look forward to the collaboration.

Oleksii Biletskyi is the institute's new Head of IT. He rose to the role from inside. As a software developer here, he built, among other tools, the web applications that monitor the MANGO deposition system.

Dirk Sander takes on a new role as Research Coordinator, after years in which he and René Kunze were the institute's interface to the Max Planck building department during construction. And the works council has a new chair: Mike Borrmann follows Andreas Frommfeld, who led it for many years, with Ilya Kostanovskiy joining as a member from the scientific staff.

A memento for new doctors

During the meeting, recent doctoral graduates received the Doctoral Defense Memento, a young tradition the institute's doctoral researchers' representatives started in December 2025: a keepsake marking that their doctorate was done here, at the MPI in Halle. The degree certificate itself comes from the university; the memento records where the research happened. It is a hard-bound folder holding a certificate signed by Prof. Parkin and a gold-plated two-inch silicon wafer with the graduate's name and thesis title etched into it, made in-house, as so much at our institute traditionally is. "We thought that it would be a nice gesture to award this memento to successful graduates — to commemorate their time as a doctoral researcher here," says Sagar Gambhira, one of the representatives.

At four o'clock the meeting moved outside, to a barbecue organised by Sagar Gambhira, Simon Arnold and Tobias Fäth. Colleagues added salads and desserts to the table, and the summer party ran into the evening.