Reinhard Genzel

Infobox_Scientist
name = Reinhard Genzel


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birth_date = birth date and age|1952|03|24|df=y
birth_place = Bad Homburg, Germany
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field = Astrophysicist
work_institution = Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
alma_mater = University of Bonn
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known_for = submillimetre astronomy
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Reinhard Genzel (born 24 March 1952 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany) is a German astrophysicist.

Life

Genzel studied physics at the University of Bonn and did his PhD in 1978 at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. He then worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was Miller Fellow from 1980 until 1982, and was also Professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981. He joined the scientific council of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in 1986, becoming director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching and lectured at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He has been an honorary Professor at the University of California, Berkeley since 1999.

Work

Reinhard Genzel studies infrared- and submillimetre astronomy. He was the first researcher to track the motions of stars at the centre of the Milky Way and show that they were orbiting a very massive object, probably a black hole [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1996Natur.383..415E] . This work has been followed up by the group of Andrea Ghez, who have performed a similar study with the Keck Telescope.

Awards

* Miller Research Fellowship, 1980-1982
* Otto Hahn Medal, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 1980
* Presidential Young Investigators Award, National Science Foundation, 1984
* Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, American Astronomical Society, 1986
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1990
* De Vaucouleurs Medal, University of Texas, 2000
* Janssen Prize, French Astronomical Society, 2000
* Stern Gerlach Medal for experimental physics, Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, 2003
* Balzan Prize, Balzan-Stiftung (Mailand), 2003
* Shaw Prize, 2008

Membership of scientific societies

* Fellow of the American Physical Society, 1985
* Foreign member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, 2000
* Foreign member of the Académie des Sciences (Institut de France), 1998
* Member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, 2002
* Member of the European Academy of Sciences, 2002
* Senior member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003

Links

* [http://www.mpg.de/cgi-bin/mpg.de/person.cgi?nav=kontakt&persId=152748&lang=de&inst=extraterrestrische_physik Genzel's Homepage at MPI]
* [http://www.balzan.it/premiati.aspx?Codice=0000000096&lang=en&show=1&from=0000000096&from2=10 The Balzan-Stiftung award]