Frank Eisenhauer is senior staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute
for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), Garching near Munich, where he is leading the development and science
exploration of large astronomical instruments and experiments.
Two of them, SINFONI and GRAVITY, are part of the instrument suite
employed in the discovery and characterization of the Galactic Center Black
Hole, for which Prof. Dr. Reinhard Genzel and Prof. Dr. Andrea Ghez have been
awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Eisenhauer was awarded the
Tycho Brahe Medal
from the European Astronomical Socety for his leadership of
the SINFONI and GRAVITY instruments, and the
Stern-Gerlach Medal
of the German Physical Society (DPG) for his pioneering work in high-resolution infrared astronomy,
which has revolutionized spectroscopic as well as astrometric studies.
Following his studies of physics at the Technical University of Munich, he started his Master- and PhD theses
with Reinhard Genzel at MPE, where he continued his scientific career to date. Over
the years his experimental focus moved from adaptive optics imaging, to integral
field spectroscopy, and now optical/IR interferometry, always with the goal of
ever better understanding of the physics of black holes and their environment.
Frank Eisenhauer is Adjunct Teaching Professor (Privatdozent) at Technical University of Munich, where he
lectures astrophysics and high angular resolution astronomy.
GRAVITY Plus: Towards
faint science, all sky, high contrast, milli-arcsecond optical
interferometric imaging (Principal Investigator)
GRAVITY: The 2nd
generation VLTI instrument for micro-arcsecond astrometry and
interferometric imaging of faint objects (Principal Investigator)
SINFONI /
SPIFFI: The
adaptive optics assisted integral field spectrometer at the VLT (Principal
Investigator for the integral field spectrometer SPIFFI)
