The Senate at RWTH Aachen University has awarded Karsten Danzmann an honorary doctorate in natural sciences. Danzmann is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) and the director of the Institute of Gravitational Physics at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH). The honorary doctorate was awarded at a ceremony in Aachen on 9 May 2025.
Karsten Danzmann has been granted the award for his outstanding contribution to the development of the technologies that led to the discovery of gravitational waves and that have significantly improved ongoing research on them, as well as his support for the Einstein Telescope project.
“I am extremely pleased about this award from RWTH Aachen University and this recognition of my work,” said Prof. Dr. Karsten Danzmann. “With the European Einstein Telescope and the LISA space observatory, we can look forward to a brilliant future in gravitational-wave astronomy.”
Karsten Danzmann is one of the world’s top scientists in the area of experimental gravitational physics. Researchers in his Laser Interferometry and Gravitational Wave Astronomy department develop and operate large gravitational-wave detectors on earth and in space. The technologies developed for the German-British gravitational-wave detector GEO600 are now used worldwide in all large detectors. Danzmann’s department has also played a central role in the development of the Einstein Telescope, the third-generation European gravitational-wave detector.
Additionally, the institute is playing a leading role in the development of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). LISA will be a mission of discovery – the first gravitational-wave observatory in space. It will observe gravitational waves that cannot be reached from earth and will gather entirely new information about the dark, invisible side of the universe.
Karsten Danzmann completed his Diplom degree in physics at the University of Hannover in 1977, and subsequently obtained a doctorate in atomic and molecular physics there in 1980. After a stay as a visiting researcher at Stanford University from 1982 to 1983, he was employed as a researcher at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin until 1986. In 1986 he returned to Stanford University as acting assistant professor of physics, before taking up a position as project head in the area of gravitational waves at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching. In 1993 he was appointed professor at the University of Hannover, where he has since headed the LUH’s Institute of Gravitational Physics. He has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover since 2002. He was also spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers until June 2022
