Monika Backhaus-Ricoult

Monika Backhaus-Ricoult is currently Senior Research Associate in Crystalline Materials Research at Corning Incorporated in Corning, New York. She was trained as a chemist and earned her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the University of Hannover, Germany.

Monika joined Corning in 2003 after 18 years of academic research experience, as Research Director at the National Research Center (CNRS) in Paris, France, Adjunct Professor at Cornell University, Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute (Stuttgart, Germany) and Research Assistant at the University of Hannover. During these years, Monika conducted and guided research and had several teaching appointments.

She holds 25 patent applications and is credited with 130 publications, as well as 88 Corning internal technical reports. She is regularly seen as speaker or session chair at international conferences, is active as referee for several renowned international journals and served as representative for the advisory committee of the Solid State Ionic Society. Over more than twenty years, Monika participated in ACerS meetings and engaged in the Basic Science Division.

Since joining Corning, Monika is recognized as a key expert in the fundamental relationship of ceramic properties with microstructure and processing. While keeping a strong emphasis on experimentation, she has fostered fundamental studies and modeling to guide discovery of novel ceramic compositions, processing and microstructures.  Her expertise in solid state reactivity has been successfully applied to porous ceramics for diesel particulate filter applications, electrochemical NOx sensors and thermoelectrics. Monika is also engaged in areas of material research for energy applications, such as solid oxide fuel cells and electrochemical devices; her key interests include in-situ studies of interfacial and surface phenomena by electron microscopy and spectroscopy.