Dieter Meschede new President of the German Physical Society
Berlin / Bad Honnef, April 4, 2018 – On April 9, Dieter Meschede takes over the presidency of the German Physical Society (DPG). He succeeds Rolf Heuer, who was president of the world’s largest physical society with about 62,000 members from April 2016 to April 2018 and is now vice president of the DPG on a rotational basis.
The official handover ceremony took place on 9 April 2018 in the Magnus-Haus Berlin, Germany. Professor Thomas Lohse from Humboldt University Berlin gave a lecture entitled “Jim Knopf and Wild Physics”.
During his presidency, Meschede would particularly like to support and further activate the great commitment of the DPG members to civil society – from physics teacher to industrial physicist to university lecturer. He would like to promote overcoming complex challenges such as the current quantum technology by continuously improving cooperation between research institutions and, above all, opening up opportunities for young scientists. Last but not least, the question of how science and technology education can acquire the status it deserves as a foundation of society will certainly remain a major challenge.
Dieter Meschede is head of the Quantum Technology group at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn. He was and is a member and speaker in numerous research projects of the DFG, the BMBF and the European Commission. In 2001, he helped establish the Bonn International Graduate School in Physics and Astronomy (BIGS-PA), which was expanded as part of the BCGS (Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy) Excellence Initiative.
Meschede has been researching in the field of quantum optics for almost forty years. The so-called “conveyor belt of light” – it moves and sorts individual atoms with the aid of laser beams and radio frequency precision – is one of the outstanding research results of his research group. With the help of this “conveyor belt”, atoms could be used as an arithmetic unit for a quantum computer. This work has received great recognition with an Advanced Grant (DQSIM) from the European Research Council.
Meschede is the editor of one of the best-known German-language textbooks in physics. It covers all known topics of experimental physics and is often used during lectures. He has also been editor-in-chief of Applied Physics B – Optics and Lasers since 2012.
He has received several awards for his scientific work. In 1989 he was the first ever young scientist to receive the Rudolf Kaiser Prize of the Rudolf Kaiser Foundation for his outstanding scientific achievements in experimental physics. In 2007, the German Physical Society awarded him the Robert Wichard Pohl Prize for his many years of innovative and internationally recognized scientific work in the field of optical atom and molecule physics and quantum information processing, as well as for his successful commitment to imparting physical knowledge and inspiring the general public for physics.
From December 2005 to February 2018, Meschede was also Scientific Director of the Physics Centre Bad Honnef, together with the Magnus-Haus Berlin the second important meeting place of the DPG for physicists in Germany and its headquarters. To avoid overlapping positions, he recently resigned and handed over the baton to the particle physicist Klaus Desch from the University of Bonn.
