The International Tammann Medal recognizes outstanding achievements in materials science and engineering that have gained international recognition. The prize commemorates Gustav Tammann, who established metallurgy as a physical-chemical science, thereby gaining high international renown. The DGM will present the 2025 International Tammann Medal to Prof. Dr. Eugen Rabkin of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

1) You have worked in very different scientific cultures — in Russia, Germany, and Israel. How have these experiences shaped your way of working? Where do you see the biggest differences? What have you personally taken away from these cultures?

I have the immense privilege of belonging to a very special group of people – researchers driven by curiosity to discover new phenomena and to explain them through the fundamental laws of nature. In a way, it is like a modern-day “masonic society” bound not by secrecy but by shared passion. Its members understand each other effortlessly, with cultural differences playing only a secondary role. Whenever I visit colleagues in universities in Germany, France, Japan, Korea, India, or the United States, I immediately feel at home, ready to roll up my sleeves, start working, and, if need be, spend the rest of my life there. This feeling of belonging has deep historical roots. In medieval Europe, when the number of educated people was small, scholars communicated across the borders of kingdoms and principalities in a shared academic language. Today, although the number of educated people is vastly greater, the best universities and research institutes have preserved this unique spirit.

In the former Soviet Union, there were only a few places that nurtured pure scientific inquiry in such a trans-cultural and apolitical spirit. I was fortunate to begin my career at one of them: the Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. ISSP was founded by the metallurgist Georgiy Kurdjumov, who in the 1920s was a visiting postdoctoral researcher under Georg Sachs, the renowned German-Jewish metallurgist, at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Metallforschung in Berlin. The well-known Kurdjumov–Sachs orientation relationship between martensite and austenite emerged from that collaboration. It is quite possible that Kurdjumov carried back to the Soviet Union some of the spirit of freedom, enthusiasm, and open scientific thinking he experienced in Sachs’ laboratory, at least as much as was possible under communist rule. In a way, when I later became a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung in Stuttgart, the successor to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut, it felt like closing a circle that Kurdjumov himself had begun.

So in the view of above said my personal scientific journey from Russia to Germany and then to Israel was quite easy. Of course, experiencing three very different cultural environments brought many benefits. I often say it allows you to see the world in “full three dimensions.”

From the Russian scientific tradition, I absorbed the emphasis on theoretical models and the use of mathematical language to interpret experimental results. One of my fields, diffusion in solids, rests on the rigorous 19th-century science, the two laws of diffusion of Adolf Eugen Fick. Incidentally, I was quite surprised to find that the memorial plaque on one of the former buildings of Würzburg University, where Fick worked and taught, describes him merely as a “German physiologist” without mentioning his seminal contributions to diffusion science.

From the German scientific tradition, I learned the absolute importance of detail: conducting clean, reproducible experiments in which all possible artifacts are eliminated. This, after all, is the essence of the scientific method. My late postdoctoral advisor, Prof. Wolfgang Gust, taught me that in a scientific manuscript there are no “more important” and “less important” parts – every detail must be right. If a reviewer sees a poorly prepared figure or micrograph, they may doubt the reliability of the entire study.

From the Israeli scientific culture which, much like Israeli cuisine, is a blend of diverse influences with a unique local ingredient, I learned the audacity to try new things. Israeli students are generally more willing to take risks and tackle difficult challenges than many of their European counterparts. This may be related to their greater maturity and, in many cases, prior army experience, where they learn to take initiative and accept responsibility.

2) You have access to hard-to-obtain specialist literature, such as that from Eastern European archives from the Iron Curtain era. What value do these older works have today, and how can their findings help us with current research?

This is certainly an advantage, but I would not say it has played a decisive role. At least in engineering, most of the important papers from the Iron Curtain era have been translated, or their key results have been incorporated into accessible handbooks. Significant works produced after the fall of the Iron Curtain are, for the most part, published in English.

3) You are said to have a special intuition for identifying the right scientific questions and conducting effective research. What advice would you give young materials scientists to help them develop this skill?

I would say that while your main attention and effort should be focused on the specific problem you are working on, it is important to set aside some time to read papers in related fields, or even popular science literature at the level of Scientific American. Fruitful analogies and unexpected solutions often come from seemingly unrelated areas. A good example is the theory of spinodal decomposition developed by John W. Cahn, one of the greatest materials scientists of the second half of the 20th century. In his memoirs, he wrote that the idea of performing a stability analysis of the nonlinear diffusion equation describing a thermodynamically unstable binary alloy by examining sinusoidal perturbations came to him while attending a course on hydrodynamic instabilities and water waves in Cambridge during his one-year visit there.

Congratulations again to Prof. Dr. Eugen Rabkin on this special award. We look forward to honoring him and all the award winners at DGM-Tag 2025, where we can get to know them personally.