On December 6, 2019, Falk Meutzner successfully defended his doctoral thesis “Crystal-chemical algorithms for the identification of potentially cation-conducting materials from crystallographic databases”. Dissertation advisor – Dr. Tilmann Leisegang. Prof. Vladislav Blatov, Director of the SCTMS, and Thomas Doert, Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at Dresden University of Technology, were the external reviewers of the doctoral thesis.The work of Falk Meutzner was dedicated to the theoretical description of cationic conductivity in solid crystalline matter. The main results deal with sodium and aluminum ion conductors and an algorithm for the theoretical identification of potentially ion-conducting materials from large crystallographic databases. The work was carried out in close cooperation between the Institute of Experimental Physics (IEP) TU Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF, Germany) and the Samara Center for Theoretical Materials Science (SCTMS).
Falk Meutzner began working on the problem of storing electrochemical energy in 2013 under the supervision of Tilmann Leisegang. Having become an employee of the Institute of Experimental Physics, Falk Meutzner, together with his supervisor, decided to use crystallographic databases to identify ionic conductors and ToposPro came to the rescue here. Falk Meutzner was actively engaged in testing the ToposPro program package on sodium ion conductors and soon published his first results of this work. Falk Meutzner first visited the SCTMS in 2015. An author of the ToposPro software package, Prof. Vladislav Blatov, invited him to further develop the algorithms – so Falk Meutzner became a member of the ToposPro Expert Team. It became the starting point for a very fruitful collaboration in which 8 publications and more than 20 conference contributions have been produced to date.