Professor Achim Walter Hassel studied chemistry at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany and made his PhD about ultrathin metal oxide layers. After a two-year research stay at the University of Hokkaido in Sapporo, Japan, he built up a research team on electrochemistry and corrosion at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. From 2007, he was scientific director of the Research School for Surface and Interface Engineering in Advanced Materials. In July 2009, he moved as full professor to the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz, where he leads the Institute for Chemical Technology of Inorganic Materials. Achim W. Hassel had a large several-year Christian Doppler Laboratory together with the steel producer voestalpine and has common activities with many other industrial partners including a producer of a Ti-based implant. He published more than 200 articles in scientific journals and has an h-index of 48. He is honorary Professor at the DPU since 2022. Within PI-SENS he is the Key Researcher for Area 1.