The Austro-German physicist Prof. Rudolf Grimm of University of Innsbruck’s physics department has confirmed that he will hold a speech at the IYPT 2010 opening ceremony. Prof. Grimm was elected Austria’s scientist of the year 2009 by the Austrian committee of science journalists.
Apart from being a full professor of experimental physics at the University of Innsbruck Prof. Grimm holds the position of research director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Austrian, German as well as American Physical Society. In his outstanding academic career Prof. Grimm has been awarded a number of prizes, the most outstanding being the Wittgenstein Award in 2005.
Prof. Grimm’s scientific interest mainly lies in research on Bose-Einstein condensate. In 2002 he, together with his team, was the first worldwide to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate of Caesium and one year later they produced a Bose-Einstein condensate from molecules. For all those wondering about what this condensate thing is, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate to find out. The realization of a Fermi condensate in 2004, which again was first achieved by Grimm and his team, was ranked among the ten most important scientific breakthroughs of 2004 by the highly renown “Science” journal.
Prof. Grimm holds a PhD of ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and studied physics at the University of Hannover. Besides successfully studying physics, then to-be Professor Grimm was guitarist of the Punk-Rock band “Bärchen-und-die-Milchbubis”. For details concerning this see http://www.baerchen-und-die-milchbubis.de/Seite2.html (German).
If you want to find out more about Prof. Grimm, visit http://www.uibk.ac.at/exphys/ultracold/people/rudolf.grimm/grimm_rudolf.pdf for a full-scale CV including some outstanding publications.