Laura Herz


Laura Maria Herz is a British-German physicist and academic, specialising in semiconductor materials and nanostructures. She is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. She works on femtosecond spectroscopy for the analysis of semiconductor materials.
WWW www-herz.physics.ox.ac.uk

Early life and education

Herz was born in June 1974. She was educated at Erzbischöfliche Liebfrauenschule Bonn, an all-girls Catholic gymnasium. She studied physics at the University of Bonn and graduated in 1999. She worked for two years as an exchange student at University of New South Wales. She joined the University of Cambridge for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in 2002. Here she worked on exciton and polaron dynamics in organic semiconductors.

Research and career

After her PhD, Herz was appointed a postdoctoral research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, in 2001. She was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Advanced Research Fellowship in 2006 and an EPSRC Open Fellowship in 2024. Herz joined the Department of Physics, University of Oxford as a lecturer in 2003. She was promoted to Reader in Physics in 2008 and appointed Professor of Physics in 2010.
Herz is an expert in perovskite semiconductors. She has researched the origins of the high charge-carrier mobilities in perovskite materials. She demonstrated that their high efficiency in solar cells was due to long charge-carrier diffusion lengths and non-Langevin recombination. She identified that perovskite light emission is broad and can be used in Ultrafast lasers. She recognised that the origin of this broadening is Fröhlich coupling to longitudinal optical phonons.
Herz is also interested in self-assembly and nanoscale effects. She works on Biomimetics light harvesting structures made of porphyrin nanorings to explore delocalised excited states.
She appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time in 2015.
In 2024, Herz was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society.
Her short citation reads:

Awards and honours

Her awards and honours include: