2005 Ford Lecture
Professor Wolfgang Ketterle
The 2005 Ford Motor Company Distinguished Lecturer, Professor Wolfgang Ketterle, is Physics Nobel laureate and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Professor Ketterle received a diploma (equivalent to master’s degree) from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich (1986). After postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, at the University of Heidelberg and at MIT, he joined the physics faculty at MIT (1993), where he is now the John D. MacArthur professor. He does experimental research in atomic physics and laser spectroscopy and focuses currently on Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases. He was among the first scientists to observe this phenomenon in 1995, and realized the first atom laser in 1997. His earlier research was in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Physics (IOP), a member of the German physical society (DPG), the Optical Society of America, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg, the European Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. His awards include a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (1996), the Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German physical society (1997), the Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation (1998), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999), the Dannie-Heineman Prize of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen, Germany (1999), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000), the Nobel Prize in Physics (2001, together with E.A. Cornell and C.E. Wieman), the Medal of Merit of the State of Baden-Würtemberg (2002), and the Knight Commander's Cross (Badge and Star) of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2002). He was selected Distinguished Traveling Lecturer of the Division of Laser Science of the American Physical Society (1998/99).
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