Professional

coversmaller.jpg I am a senior lecturer at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Here I am currently building up my laboratory and group. Before that I was a group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen of the WhiGaMoR group. My primary interest lies in the exciting area of dielectric microcavities, in the linear and non-linear domain, both experimental and theoretical. Currently I am interested in the polarization properties of birefringent whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonators, their effects on phase-matching of non-linear interactions and of WGM resonators in the THz and microwave domain. Furthermore we are interested in stabilized micro-lasers in the optical domain.


Private

I was born in Berlin, started in 1994 my studies of Physics and Mathematics at the BTU-Cottbus in Germany. After my Vordiplom and one additional year, I began with my graduate studies at Yale University in 1998, and obtained my Ph.D. with my study on “Directionality and Vector Resonances of Regular and Chaotic Dielectric Microcavities” in 2004. After my Ph.D. I continued to work at Yale as a post-doc and took the opportunity to spend some time as a visiting scholar ATR in Kyoto, Japan. From November 2005 till November 2009, I worked at the Max-Planck-Research Group for Optics and later the Max-Planck-Institute for the science of light (MPL) in Erlangen. From November 2009 - June 2015, I was a researcher at the Chair for Optics (Prof. Gerd Leuchs) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where I completed my habilitation and was a groupleader at the MPL. Now I have relocated with my family to New Zealand and we are extremely happy here.

If you like what I do and are interested in research opportunities, drop me a line.