Irene Battisti is the discoverer of the year 2019. The physicist won the C.J. Kok Public Award for her research into microscopy and superconductors.

Battisti first came  to Leiden University in 2013 on the Erasmus programme while doing her Masters in Physics at the University of Padua. Later, when she decided to pursue a PhD, Milan Allan’s group in Leiden seemed the obvious choice. Read the article