Prof Dr. Silke Christiansen who is the Director at the Helmholtz-Center Berlin for Materials & Energy at the Institute of ‘Nanoarchitectures for energy conversion’ and Group leader at the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light, of an ‘Independent scientific research group for Photonic Nanostructures’ just gave a great talk on ‘Advanced nano- composite materials and their application in energy harvesting and sensing’ as part of the Materials Science Lecture Series. We thank her for an interesting overview concerning her work on nano-composites composed of silicon (Si) and GaN nanowires (NWs) as well as nano-materials functionalization.