Klaus Richter to be nominated President of the German Physical Society from 2024 to 2026

Bad Honnef on November 14, 2022 – It is a good tradition in the German Physical Society (DPG) to appoint a successor to the incumbent president more than a year before the end of their term of office, so that the nominee can be familiarized with the responsible position and ensure continuity in the leadership of the DPG.

At its recent meeting, the DPG's Council now elected Prof. Dr. Klaus Richter from the University of Regensburg as the next president of the world's largest physics society with around 55,000 members.

The election of a new president takes place every two years. In April 2024, Richter will take over from incumbent President Joachim Ullrich, who cannot be re-elected. Like his predecessor, Ullrich will then assume the office of vice president for two years.

Klaus Richter, born in 1962, studied physics at the universities of Kiel and Freiburg. After receiving his diploma in 1988, he completed his doctorate three years later at the University of Freiburg in theoretical atomic physics on Rydberg states in the helium atom. He then shifted his research interests to condensed matter physics and, after a stay at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Sud in Orsay/Paris from 1992 to 1994. After two years as a research assistant at the University of Augsburg, where he received his habilitation in 1998 on the topic of "Semiclassical Theory of Mesoscopic Quantum Systems", he headed a junior research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden from 1996 to 2001.

Since 2001, Richter has held a chair in the field of condensed matter theory at the University of Regensburg. His research group "Complex Quantum Systems" conducts research there in the fields of solid-state physics; cold atom physics and many-body quantum chaos. He was awarded the Physikpreis Dresden in 2019 for his work. His research has received great recognition with funding under the DFG's Reinhart Koselleck Program. Very recently he has been awarded the title “Professor of the Year 2022” by the UNICUM Foundation. In Regensburg, Klaus Richter has been the spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center "Emergent Relativistic Effects in Condensed Matter" of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) since 2017.

Klaus Richter is actively involved in the German scientific community. In the German Physical Society, he was spokesperson of the Division "Dynamics and Statistical Physics" from 2006 to 2009 and chaired the "Condensed Matter Section” from 2012 to 2015. From 2017 to 2021, Klaus Richter was also a member of the DPG Executive Board responsible for Conferences and Awards.

The German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft e. V.; DPG), which was founded way back in 1845, is the oldest national and, with more about 55,000 members, also the largest physical society in the world. As a non-profit-making organisation it pursues no economic interests. The DPG promotes the transfer of knowledge within the scientific community through conferences, events and publications, and aims to open a window to physics for the curious. Its special focuses are on encouraging junior scientists and promoting equal opportunities. The DPG’s head office is at Bad Honnef am Rhein. Its representative office in the capital is the Magnus-Haus Berlin. Website: www.dpg-physik.de