Wolfgang Sandner, German physicist, Died at 66

Wolfgang Sandner was born in 1949, in Teisendorf, Germany, and died on December 5, 2015.

Wolfgang Sandner studied physics and received his PhD at Freiburg University in 1979.

He worked as a professor at Würzburg and Freiburg universities in Germany and at the University of Tennessee in the USA.

Sandner served as Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short-Pulse Spectroscopy, from 1993 to 2013,

He was also a Member of the Board of Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. From 1994 to 2014 he was professor of physics in Technische Universität Berlin.

The good doctor participated in many national and international science and of research, policy organizations, particularly in the EU, as an advisor to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and as a member of scientific advisory boards of many research institutes.

From the year 2003 through 2013, Sandner was coordinator of the LaserLab Europe, a project funded by the European Union Network including 26 research institutions in 16 countries.

Wolfgang has chaired the Association of European-level Research Infrastructure Facilities.

Wolfgang was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and served as president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft DPG (German Physical Society) from 2010 to 2012.

Dr. Sandner special areas of research included atomic physics, light-matter interaction at ultra-high intensities, relativistic laser plasma dynamics, laser particle acceleration, atomic and molecular ionization dynamics in strong and ultra-strong laser fields, development and application of short-pulse lasers of highest peak and average power, and laser-based UV- und X-ray sources.

He has authored more than 200 publications, including numerous papers for SPIE.

The doctor also worked on the steering committees for SPIE Optics plus Optoelectronics 2015, and he had been scheduled to give a featured talk at SPIE Photonics Europe 2016.

He was also Director General of the Extreme Light Infrastructure Delivery Consortium (ELI-DC) International Association.

Wolfgang Sandner died at 66 yrs old passed away leaving his wife, son, and daughter, along with other family and many friends and colleagues who mourn his loss.