I am Senior Staff Scientist in the group of Prof. Reinhard Genzel at the Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), where I am responsible for the near-infrared instrumentation. I graduated in Physics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, in 1995. After that I joined the group of Prof. Reinhard Genzel for my PhD studies, and since then I am abide with MPE. In my PhD studies I developed and built the infrared camera system SHARP II+ for the world’s first astronomical adaptive optics facility at the ESO 3.6 m telescope in Chile, and derived the stellar initial mass function for a proto-type starburst clusters observed with this instrument. I received my PhD degree in Physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) of Munich, Germany, in 1998. After that I joined the SPIFFI-SINFONI project for the development of a new integral field spectrometer, which I am leading since 2003 as Principal Investigator. The instrument has been installed at the ESO 8m VLT in 2003/2004. My astronomical research is focused on the Galactic Center black hole and surrounding star cluster. In 2005 I started as Principal Investigator the development of the GRAVITY instrument, with the goal of probing strong–gravity physics close to Schwarzschild horizon of the Galactic Center black hole by interferometrically combining the light from the four 8m Telescopes of the ESO VLTI. I am also member of the Cluster of Excellence for the exploration of the origin and structure of the universe of the Munich universities TUM and LMU and the Max-Planck-Institutes for extraterrestrial Physics and Astrophysics. In 2011 I have received my Habilitation from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, for my work on the techniques for and the observations of the Galactic Center at high angular resolution.
Impressum, last update: 2011-09-06, editor of this page: Frank Eisenhauer