CV (public area)

Concerning myself: Born in the year the first human ever set a foot on extraterrestrial soil, I spent the first four years of my life in the German City of Osnabrück. In 1973 my parents, my baby brother Oliver, my grand parents (i.e. my mother’s parents), and I moved to the countryside near the city of the Westphalian Peace to a village called Natbergen. In 1976 I started basic school in the villages of Wissingen and Jeggen. After four years I regularly changed to Orientation School in Bissendorf, which I left after two years with a high school recommendation (Gymnasium). From 1982 to 1989 I went to the Käthe-Kollwitz-Gymnasium, finally back in Osnabrück. I left school qualified for university entrance. But before I could enjoy the sweet life of an university student, I had to complete my military service. Though I qualified for officer and jet pilot training, I went for a civilian career.
In 1990 I entered the Technical University of Braunschweig to become an Aeronautics and Space Engineer. But in the early 90s virtually every major ESA (and NASA) project was cancelled. That let me to the decision to change over to Physics, the field I majored in in High School. In 1998 I got my graduation certificate. I stayed at the TU Braunschweig until I changed to the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig where I started my doctorate in 1999.
Waiting for the right project proved worthwhile. I was able to do my research at the very peak of international science designing and fabricating superconducting digital electronics for metrological purposes. I had the chance to travel several times to the US and present my work in front of an international audience at renowned conferences. A cooperation with the (US) Office of Naval Research gave me the opportunity to give lectures at such distinguished universities as the University of California at Berkeley, Ca, the Northwestern University at Evanston, Chicago, Il, and the Arizona State University at Tempe, Az.
I defended my thesis in 2003 at the renowned Friedrich-Schiller-University at Jena (actually in the exactly same room Erwin Schrödinger gave lectures in 1920) and was awarded the doctorate with the distinction “magna cum laude”. As post-doc I stayed at the PTB to work on the development of new microsystem fabrication techniques for sub-µm structures for Josephson Arbitrary Waveform Synthesizers.

During my studies I lived in a student hostel, where I was a member of the hostel’s student administration. By long and painful negotiations I was able to reduce the extras by about 15 % reorganizing certain cleaning and maintaining procedures.
I was engaged in university sports, where I co-headed the ice hockey department and founded a regional hockey league, which I managed for several years.
Later on I co-founded a literature club called Phantastika Raum & Zeit e.V. (Phantastika Space & Time), a society, which goal it is to support the fantasy and science fiction genre and the German fantastic literature scene in particular. The club organized several science fiction and fantasy conventions, most of them regarded as the best event of the respective year. The club hosts a website www.ScienceFiction.de which is well renowned and respected for hundreds over hundreds of reviews of most current and classical books and stories.
A spin-off of the www.ScienceFiction.de website is www.SpaceTimes.de, a location hosted by myself, where I collect the most interesting and spectacular developments of technological invention and discoveries of space science. Commonly, I refine specific articles and put them into a more understandable form. Parallel I am producing and co-hosting a monthly radio show called Phantastische Welten (fantastic worlds). In this show my wife to be Claudia and I are discussing the most recent and most exciting news of science fiction and hard science fact.
Concerning Claudia: I met my wife to be in university. We went steady for about two years when we decided to move together. A little luck at the stock market offered us the opportunity to buy a house, which we totally rehabilitated over the following years.