Jürgen Wolfrum

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Jürgen Wolfrum (born September 23, 1939 in Jena ) is a German physical chemist and senior professor of physical chemistry at the University of Heidelberg .

Life

Jürgen Wolfrum grew up as the son of Professor Erich Wolfrum and the teacher Christa Wolfrum (née Otto) in Jena. After attending the experimental school of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and graduating from the Grete Unrein Oberschule in Jena in 1957, Wolfrum completed an internship at the Jena Institute for Thermal Engineering and Automation. In 1958 he moved from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany , where he first attended the Felix-Klein-Gymnasium in Göttingen and in the same year took the recognition test for the GDR Abitur in Hanover . From 1958 to 1965 he studied physics in Göttingen and Hamburg with a degree in physics at III. Physics Institute of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and doctorate to Dr. rer. nat. at the Institute for Physical Chemistry, with the grade “Summa cum laude”. The doctoral supervisor of his dissertation “Experiments for the Exact Determination of the Speed ​​of Elementary Chemical Reactions” was Heinz Georg Wagner , as his research assistant Wolfrum followed him in 1970 to the Max Planck Institute for Flow Research . In the intervening years, Wolfrum was a research assistant at the Ruhr University in Bochum . In the years 1970 to 1982 with Wagner, a stay at the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley fell in the working group of CB Moore. In 1974 and 1975 the Venia legendi for physical chemistry at the University of Göttingen with the habilitation thesis “On reactive behavior vibrational molecules in the gas phase ". In 1980 the University of Göttingen appointed him extraordinary professor. In 1982 he accepted the chair for physical chemistry at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . Since 1992 he has been an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. In 1999 he was Russell Severance Springer Professor at the University of California at Berkeley .

Act

Wolfrum's research areas in the field of laser-induced chemical processes are the microscopic dynamics of chemical elementary reactions in the gas phase, elementary combustion reactions, chemical reactions in the atmosphere and laser-induced ignition processes. In the laser diagnostics of technical processes he works on investigations of elementary catalytic reactions under realistic conditions with the help of sum frequency spectroscopy , laser analysis of CVD processes (diamond, GaN), laser light section analysis of gasoline and diesel engines, aircraft gas turbines and turbulent swirl flames, the in-situ -Alkaline detection in pressure fluidized bed reactors as well as in the laser control of waste incineration plants and power plants. Another area of ​​research is the use of lasers in biology and medicine, especially the UV micro-beam and optical tweezers, DNA sequencing , single-molecule detection with semiconductor lasers and multiplex dyes (nucleotides, proteins, tumor markers).

In 1978 Wolfrum was co-founder and deputy spokesman of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 93 "Photochemistry with Lasers". Since 1984 Wolfrum has been co-editor of the journal "Applied Physics B". In 1984 he was one of the founders of the working group “TECFLAM - Mathematical Modeling and Laser Measurement of Combustion Processes” at the universities of Berlin, Darmstadt, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and the DLR. 1984 Co-editor of the publishers of the journal "Applied Physics B". 1988 co-founder and member of the board of directors of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University. In 1990 he became Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Farkas Center for Light-Induced Processes at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Since 2000 he has been a member of the University Council of Heidelberg University and since 2001 a member of the International Space Station (ISS) Review Panel. In 2002 the Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation appointed him to the board of trustees, and in the same year he was admitted to the advisory board of the Karlsruhe Research Center.

Awards

Wolfrum has been a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 1991 , of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) since 2002 and of the National Academy of Sciences of India since 2004.

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