Elmar Zeitler

Elmar Zeitler (born March 12, 1927 in Würzburg ) is a German physicist.

Life

After completing his military service with the Air Force and being an American prisoner of war, Zeitler studied physics in his hometown of Würzburg . His dissertation in 1953 "Investigations into the hard secondary radiation of cosmic rays" was supervised by Helmuth Kulenkampff . After four years of work (1954–58) in the chemical industry ( Bayer Leverkusen ), he began to study the quantitative aspects of electron microscopy during a research stay at the Nobel Institute for Cell Research in Stockholm in 1958. Molecular weight determination with the aid of the electron microscope dates from this time . This was followed by his habilitation and teaching with the lecture "Physics for Medicine" at the Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg . Quantitative electron microscopy remained the main subject of his research, which he continued in Washington in the biophysical department of Walter Reed Hospital . Together with G. Bahr he organized a symposium on “Quantitative Electron Microscopy” in Washington DC in 1964, which made a significant contribution to the establishment of this research direction. In 1968 he followed a call as professor at the University of Chicago , Department of Physics and Department of Biophysics. In 1977 he was appointed a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and a director at the Fritz Haber Institute , succeeding Ernst Ruska . He remained head of the electron microscopy department until his retirement in 1995. At the Fritz Haber Institute he particularly promoted the work of his employees in the fields of quantitative electron microscopy (M. van Heel), cryo-electron microscopy with a superconducting lens (F. Zemlin), Photoelectron microscopy (W. Engel) and electron energy loss spectroscopy (D.Krahl).

In addition, he was an honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin, 1975 founding editor of the journal Ultramicroscopy near North-Holland ( Elsevier ) and an honorary member of numerous international organizations for electron microscopy. From 1982–84 he was President of the German Society for Electron Microscopy and 1990–94 as President of the International Federation of Societies for Electron Microscopy (IFSEM). In 1989 he was named a Distinguished Scientist by the Electron Microscopy Society of America (EMSA).

Zeitler is the author and co-author of around 200 scientific publications.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Experimental Cell Research Vol. 12 (1967)
2. ^ Symposium Washington DC: Quantitative Electron Microscopy

Web links

• Gianluigi Botton, Kevin Moore, Dangsheng Su, Micron 34 (Elsevier 2003) 119