Frank Eisenhauer
Senior staff scientist
Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics
Giessenbachstrasse, 85748 Garching, Germany
Tel.: +49 (0)89 30000 3563
Fax: +49 (0)89 30000 3569
Email: eisenhau@mpe.mpg.de
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 Gruber Cosmology Prize for designing instruments that collected evidence for a black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Stern-Gerlach Medal of the German Physical Society (DPG) for his pioneering work in high-resolution infrared astronomy, the Tycho Brahe Medal of the European Astronomical Society for his leadership of the SINFONI and GRAVITY instruments, the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for the development of astronomical instrumentation, and the Michelson Investigator Achievement Award for the groundbreaking results of VLTI-GRAVITY. He is foreign associate to the Académie des sciences - Institut de France.
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.