Silvia Viola Kusminskiy is Professor for Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at RWTH Aachen University and head of the Research Group “Theory of Hybrid Quantum Systems” at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) in Erlangen, Germany. She obtained her PhD in Physics from Boston University and continued her academic career in Germany, where she held postdoctoral positions at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuernberg, and MPL. Her research comprises mesoscopic systems and light-matter interaction, with emphasis on collective phenomena with a focus on hybrid systems including magnetic degrees of freedo