Marianne Liebi
Biography
Marianne Liebi is Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at EPF Lausanne and head of the Laboratory for X-ray characterization of materials (cam-X) and the group “Structure and Mechanics of Advanced Materials” at PSI. She has been appointed in 2021 at EPFL where she is part of the Institute of Materials within the School of Engineering. Marianne Liebi studied Food Science at ETH Zurich where she also obtained her PhD in 2013 in the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering lead by Prof. Erich J. Windhab. Within this project started using small-angle neutron scattering at PSI for the characterization of soft-matter, namely of magnetic alignable self-assembly structures. As a Postdoc in the coherent X-ray scattering group at the Swiss Light Source she worked from 2013-2016 on method development in SAXS tensor tomography. In 2016 she moved to Sweden where after a short period at the NanoMAX beamline, MAXIV Laboratory, Lund she started her own research group in 2017 as Assistant Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, and became Docent in Physics in spring 2020. She kept her affiliation at Chalmers University of Technology, where still part of her group is located (Liebi research group) when moving back to Switzerland in 2020 where she was Scientific Group Leader in the Center for X-ray Analytics at Empa, St.Gallen, before starting the joint position between EPFL and PSI in November 2021.Research
The focus of Marianne Liebi's research is in the development of advanced X-ray imaging techniques and their application towards materials with hierarchical structures. Her main expertise is small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) imaging in 2D and 3D, but include other imaging modalities such as ptychographic nanotomography, X-ray fluorescence or phase contrast tomography. The applications her group is working on in different collaborations are spanning a broad range from biomimetic hierarchical nanocomposites, materials based on cellulose, ink-based 3D printing, industrial injection-molded plastics as well as the characterization of bone and other biological tissues. A common denominator of these diverse applications is the arrangement of nanometer-sized building blocks within macroscopic samples, in particular the alignment of anisotropic constituents.
Teaching & PhD
Teaching
Materials Science and Engineering
Courses
Structure of materials
Introduction to materials structure including crystallography, the structure of amorphous materials such as glasses, polymers and biomaterials as well as the basics of characterization techniques.
Material science at large scale facilities
This course provides a broad introduction into materials research using synchrotron X-rays, neutrons and myons. After an introduction into large scale facilities, we will dive into the different methods, including application examples from various fields of materials science.