Scientist Spotlights

Before Philipp Pelz started as professor for computational materials microscopy at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the National Center for Electron Microscopy, US. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg and the Max ...

Birgit Stiller is an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Previously, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia for 4 years on the subject of integrated photonic circuits. Before that, she was a postdoc in quantum optics...

Andreas Maier is a professor of computer science working in the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. After graduation in 2009 he started working as post-doctoral fellow at the Radiological Sciences Laboratory at the Stanford University. Subsequently he became innovation project manage...

Maximilian Waldner is a clinician scientist with a specialization in gastroenterology. Since the beginning of his scientific career at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, he has been interested in applications of optical imaging techniques for the evaluation of inflammatory diseases and canc...

Oliver Friedrich had a quite diverse education, studying Medicine and Physics at University of Heidelberg, then specializing as Physiologist and Biophysicist before finally ending up at FAU as Biotechnologist with a strong focus on label-free optical technologies development and applications. In bet...

After her study on material science, Marion Merklein received a PhD in mechanical engineering. Her PhD thesis is about laser forming of aluminum alloys and the influence of the laser forming process on the materials‘ microstructure and mechanical characteristics. In 2006 she finished her habilita...

Andreas Erdmann studied physics at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where he received a PhD for his work on “Nonlinear optical phase conjugation in photorefractive Bi12GeO20 crystals and applications in optical metrology”. From 1990 to 1995 he worked as a post-doc at the University of Osna...

After finishing a doctoral program at ETH Zurich in 2000, Bernd Witzigmann has spent 4 years in industrial research in the US, which then was followed by an assistant professorship at ETH Zurich in the electrical engineering department again. From 2008 to 2021, he has been heading the Computational ...

Philip Russell is an emeritus founding Director at the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light and was formerly Krupp Professor of Experimental Physics at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). He obtained his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1979, and has worked ...

Maria Chekhova obtained her PhD at the Lomonosov University Moscow in 1989, for a work on polariton spectroscopy, and stayed there as a researcher and a group leader. Her habilitation thesis in 2004 dealt with the polarization and spectral properties of two-photon light. From 1997 to 2009, she worke...

Joachim von Zanthier leads the group Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Physics Department of FAU. His group investigates multi-photon states, fragile states of light which carry additional information about the emitting sample. Multi-photon interferences can be used, for example, to imag...

Hanieh Fattahi received her PhD in Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. After graduation in 2016, she received the Minerva fast-track scholarship of the Max Planck Society, which allowed her to establish a research group within the chair of Prof. Ferenc Krausz at Max Planck Institute o...