Change of Institute Director
12 May 2015
At the end of March, Prof. Dieter Richter handed over the leadership of the Institute for Neutron Scattering (ICS-1/JCNS-1) after reaching retirement age; Dr. Andreas Wischnewski has taken over as Acting Head until a successor is appointed.
Left: Prof. Dieter Richter, right: Dr. Andreas Wischnewski
Image: Forschungszentrum Jülich
Prof. Dr. Dieter Richter was appointed Director at the Institute of Solid State Research (IFF) at Forschungszentrum Jülich in 1989, and from 2011 onwards was head of the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS) and the Institute of Complex Systems (ICS).Parallel to this, Prof. Richter also had a full professorship at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Münster.
His scientific interests lie in particular in the structure and dynamics of soft condensed matter. Dieter Richter has been awarded numerous prizes for his outstanding achievements in the area of polymer research and neutron scattering, including in 1987 the Walter Schottky Prize for solid state research from the German Physical Society (DPG), the Max Planck Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society in 1990, the Erwin Schrödinger Prize from the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft in 2002 and in 2009 the Walter Hälg Prize from the European Neutron Scattering Association, ENSA.
Since the 1990s, Richter has been actively engaged in many different associations and committees in neutron and large scale facilities research. He was the founder and from 1994 – 1997 the first Chairman of ENSA, from 1992 – 1998 Chairman of the Committee Research with Neutrons, from 1996 – 1998 member of the large scale facilities commission of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and from 2000 – 2003 the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee at the European Spallation Source (ESS) Project and Scientific Director at the ESS.
Dieter Richter will stay on at Forschungszentrum Jülich to continue with his scientific research on functional polymer systems and their correlation with the dynamics and function of biomolecules. In the area of science policy and related issues, he will act in an advisory capacity with regard to new neutron sources and will work at the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) to establish “Soft Matter” as an independent area in its own right.
Physicist Dr. Andreas Wischnewski has been Deputy Director of JCNS-1 and ICS-1 since 2011, as well as head of the ESS Department of Instrumentation at JCNS and the ESS Competence Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Wischnewski has been committed to Jülich since writing his Master’s thesis at the IFF in 1995. He initially conducted his research at the IFF and then at JCNS from 2011 onwards.
During this time he was, among other things, seconded to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the department for the decommissioning, dismantling and disposal of experimental nuclear sites, and from 2012-2014 worked as Project Coordinator of the collaborative research project “Contributions of the Helmholtz Association Centres and Technische Universität München to the ESS Design Update Phase ”.