Bio
VALERIA LAUTER is a Senior R&D Staff Scientist in the Neutron Scattering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. in experimental and theoretical solid state physics in 1997 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna and a M.Sc. in Solid States Physics and Quantum Electronics in Physics and Engineering Institute (MEPhI) in Moscow. Prior to taking on her position at ORNL in 2008, she held a position of Research Scientist at Technical University of Munich (Germany) (1999 – 2007) and Research Scientist at University of Konstanz (Germany) (1995 – 1999); in 1993-1994 she was sharing her time working at CNRS and ESRF, Grenoble; during a period of 1994 – 2008 she was Visiting Scientist at the Institute Laue Langevin, at Grenoble (France). She performs grazing incidence polarized neutron scattering research with a few recent examples like the discovery of a high-temperature ferromagnetic topological insulating phase by proximity coupling, providing a crucial step toward obtaining and understanding the occurrence of a ferromagnetic phase in a topological insulator at room temperature; realizing unique in operando experiments combining polarized neutron reflectometry (PNR) with in situ ferromagnetic resonance setup; or with in situ photoexcitation. Having been the Lead Instrument Scientist at the Magnetism Reflectometer (MR) at the Spallation Neutron Source from 2008 to 2017, she established the MR to be the state of the art instrument and enabled new directions in neutron scattering research attracting diverse user community that allowed to realize unique in situ PNR experiments on the investigation of the proposed recently new form of the solid state, the so-called ‘spontelectric state’; probing weak ferromagnetism in diluted magnetic semiconductors; realizing controllable metamagnetic transition in metamagnetic artificial multiferroic films. She has 75 invited talks, published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, edited one book and contributed to three book chapters. Her research interests include low-dimensional magnetic systems, topological systems, topological insulator/magnetic insulator heterostructures, oxide heterostructures, superconductors, magnetic nanocomposites and soft matter, polarized neutron scattering.