The Gaede Prize 2020 is awarded to Dr. Takashi Kumagai for his outstanding work on near-field physics and chemistry in plasmonic nano-junctions. The Gaede award recognizes excellent work in the area of vacuum science and is awarded by the German Physical Society (DPG) in cooperation with the Gaede foundation to scientists in an early career stage.
Takashi Kumagai studied chemistry at the University of Kyoto and received his PhD degree in 2011 on visualization of hydrogen bond dynamics at surfaces. He subsequently joined our department as a postdoc with Leonhard Grill and is heading the “Nanoscale Surface Chemistry” group since 2013. He performed fundamental studies on tautomerization reactions on single molecules and developed new instrumentation in in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to address fundamental questions in nanoscale light–matter interactions using highly controlled plasmonic STM junctions.