Frank Eisenhauer is scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director 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, the
Instrument Development Award
of the German Astronomical Society for the development of innovative complex infrared instruments, 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
and was awarded the academic honor of
TUM Distinguished Affiliated Professor by the Technical University of Munich.
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 Professor 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)
