Professional employment and academic education
2016 – 2023
Vice President of the Universität Hamburg
Since 2003
Full Professor (C4) at the Universität Hamburg
1996 – 2002
Full Professor (C4) at the Universität Halle
1995
Habilitation in Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München
1993 – 1996
DFG Heisenberg Fellow, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München
1991 – 1993
Research Fellow at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
1988 – 1991
Research Associate at SLAC, Stanford University, USA
1985 – 1988
PhD in Physics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
1979 – 1985
Diploma in Physics at the Universität Karlsruhe
Selected professional memberships
Since 2016
Member of Scientific Advisory Panel of the Institute of Physics at the
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Since 2012
Member of Advisory Board of the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics
Since 2005
Founding member of the “Akademie der Wissenschaften in Hamburg”
2009 – 2016
Member of the Scientific Committee of the Galileo Galilei Institute (GGI)
2006 – 2016
Spokesperson of the SFB 676 “Particles, Strings and the Early Universe”
2006 – 2012
Member of the Minerva-Weizmann Committee
2000 – 2007
Spokesperson of the DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm (SPP 1096) “Stringtheorie
im Kontext von Teilchenphysik, Quantenfeldtheorie, Kosmologie und
Mathematik”
1999 – 2007
Member of the Advisory Committee of the Max
Planck Institute “Mathematik der Naturwissenschaften”, Leipzig
Selected research topics and accomplishments
The main research topics include supersymmetric quantum field theories, supergravity and
its scalar geometry and string theory. More specifically, the computation of the low energy
effective action of string compactification and the phenomenological and conceptual
implications for particle physics and cosmology is a central research. A close connection with
differential geometry arises from two related avenues. Firstly, the geometrical structures of
the compactification manifold are directly related to properties of models in particle physics
and cosmology. Secondly, the scalar sector of supergravity coincides with moduli space of
the compactification manifold and mutually interesting properties have been uncovered. More
recently, anti-de Sitter backgrounds of all supergravities together with their moduli spaces
have been analyzed in a unified approach and the relevance for the AdS/CFT
correspondence has been discussed.
