Born 1971 in Munich
married to artist Janina Hornberger
proud father of two boys

I became Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2011. Before that, I headed a research group on Molecular Quantum Optics at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden.

In 2004 I was awarded an Emmy Noether grant for research on decoherence and entanglement with massive particles. It allowed me running an independent research group for five years at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich. Prior to that, I spent two postdoc years in the group of Markus Arndt and Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna, supported by the Emmy Noether programme.

My PhD studies on Quantum Chaos were supervised by Uzy Smilansky. I spent the first two years at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, supported by a Minerva fellowship. The third year was carried out at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden with Andreas Buchleitner. After receiving a PhD from the LMU Munich in 2001, I was awarded a Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society for my thesis.

I studied Physics at the University of Munich from 1992 till 1997, supported by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. I spent the final year of my studies at the Max-Planck Insitute for Quantum Optics in Garching to do my diploma thesis with Andreas Buchleitner.