"Live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry" (Jack Kerouac) -
Enamored with the Universe, while hiking the Kalalau Trail on Kauai, Hawai'i

I'm a theoretical physicist working on neutrinos and cosmology, a professor at TU Dortmund University, and a book and Nature lover. I also dabbled occasionally with science writing and philosophy. Along the way, I tried to become an inventor of time machines, inspired several science fiction stories and helped to paint the orangutan cage in the Honolulu zoo. I feel most happy near the ocean, and I still have a surfboard in Hawai'i.

I was born and raised in beautiful Bremen, an old Hanse town located in the lowlands of northern Germany some thirty-five nautical miles inland from the mouth of the river Weser into the North Sea. Already in my early days when I learned some Latin and classical Greek at the Altes Gymnasium Bremen, I became deeply fascinated about ancient knowledge, modern science and the foundational questions both subjects entail. Ever since, my curiousness and deep desire to investigate the areas behind the horizon drove me to travel the world.

After studying physics and some philosophy in Bremen and Heidelberg, I started my career as a graduate student at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik in Heidelberg, working on an extremely rare nuclear process: the simultaneous occurrence of two radioactive beta decays within a single nucleus, known as double beta decay. While this phenomenon happens occasionally, albeit with a half life larger than what's usually quoted as the age of the Universe, there may be a more interesting (and even more rare) version of the decay that doesn't emit any neutrinos, and would require the neutrino to have a mass and be its own anti-particle. Heroic experimental efforts during the 1990ies that culminated in the 2015 Nobel prize confirmed that neutrinos indeed are massive. Since this possibility wasn't intended in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, it is generally considered as an indication for new Physics Beyond the Standard Model, and one of the hottest topics in science. Neutrinos being their own anti-particles, for example, may be related to the question why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe. They also may be a consequence of a yet to be discovered theory of quantum gravity. Neutrinos and neutrinoless double beta decay thus provided me with a perfect lever to explore various ideas of new physics and their experimental consequences, all the way up to Grand Unification, early universe cosmology, extra dimensions of spacetime, and even the possibility of time travel. In 1999 I was awarded a PhD from the "Ruperto Carola" University of Heidelberg (established 1386).

After a brief stint at the University of Valencia in Spain, I had postdoc positions at Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN and the University of Würzburg, followed by two years of an almost endless summer in paradise: at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, HI. In 2005 I was awarded the Habilitation from the "Julia Maximiliana" University of Würzburg (established 1402). Over the course of my career, I authored more than 80 publications in refereed journals, with more than 5000 citations. My research was featured four times on the cover of the New Scientist magazine, and an article I wrote with Martin Hirsch and Werner Porod about how neutrino experiments light the way to new physics became a Scientific American cover feature (both in the US and its Taiwanese, Polish, Brazilian, Spanish, Russian, French and Japanese international editions). It also got reprinted in the collector's edition "Ultimate Physics: From Quarks to the Cosmos", next to a piece by Stephen Hawking.

I was a visiting scientist, among other places, at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Assergi/Italy, the ICTP Trieste, CERN Theory Division, Fermilab Theory Group, the Aspen Center of Physics and the KITP in Santa Barbara and presented my research in conference talks, seminars and colloquia all over Europe and the US, as well as in Russia, Chile, Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore, Israel and India. I also was one of the initiators of the "Beyond the Desert" conference series on particle physics beyond the standard model, and from 2017-2019, I served on the Editorial Board of the research journal Physical Review D.

While living in Hawaii, on a small island in the midst of the vast Pacific ocean with its culture coined by the belief in "lokahi", the harmony and unity of diverse elements, my perspective on the Universe changed, and I grasped more clearly how Nature works as a "net-like intricate fabric" (in the words of the great German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt). Around the same time, through intensive discussions with quantum pioneer H. Dieter Zeh, I realized how quantum entanglement unifies the cosmos into a single quantum reality. These insights gradually converted me to the philosophy of monism.

In the fall of 2006, I left Hawaii - so long, sex wax 5x! - to become a respectable faculty member, first at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, AL, and soon after at TU Dortmund University. Living with my wife Sara and our son Hemmi close again to my place of birth, I'm still in search of the perfect wave and the next hint towards the ultimate theory of Nature ...

I believe in science as the best guideline for decision making, so in politics I'm supporting the small German party Partei der Humanisten, that is advocating a progressive liberal, secular and decidedly pro-science agenda.