Cornelia Denz
About Optica
Cornelia Denz
Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany
Cornelia Denz has been President of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) since May 2022. It is the National Metrology Institute of the Federal Republic of Germany and it’s highest and only authority in terms of correct and reliable measurements with scientific and technical service tasks. As head of the institution, she is responsible for a total of 2196 employees (as at 24th of October 2024). She supports the development of modern metrology along the major technological challenges. In the two years of her term of office, she has made the broad research spectrum of topics from the fields of physics, engineering, chemistry, and medicine her own.
The deep scientific expertise of Cornelia Denz lies in the field of structured light where she has tailored light in all its degrees of freedom - namely amplitude, phase and polarization - and thus created novel approaches for data storage, information processing or sensors for imaging. Her field of interest is to structure light to tailor matter and its applications in nonlinear optics, biophotonics, nanophotonics, and digital optics.
She received her PhD in physics from Darmstadt University of Technology in 1992 with a thesis on optical neural networks. Then, she was a research assistant at Institut d’Optique in Orsay, France. In 1999 she obtained tenure from Darmstadt University of Technology on pattern formation in nonlinear optics. She was the Director of the Institute of Applied Physics and Full Professor at the University of Muenster. In 2005 she founded the Center for Nonlinear Science and in 2007 the hands-on pupil's lab MExLab Physics. From 2010-2016 she served as a Vice Rector for International Affairs and Young Researchers of University of Muenster, and from 2011 to 2022 she has been the head of university-wide hands-on pupil's lab MExlab ExperiMINTe.
Some of her most seminal contributions to different fields connected to structured light have been the light-assisted bottom-up assembly by holographic optical tweezers in nanophysics, the optical and dielectrophoretic trapping of absorbing matter and droplets in lab-on-a-chip systems, the implementation of optical trapping in biophysics for cell inspection and blood vessel analysis, the fabrication of photonic 2d solid state materials with conical intersections and flat band, sensors and sensor methods for optical trapping and last but not least the holographic optical data storage and optical neural network.
Beneath her overall achievements in the science of structured light and its application to nanophysics, droplet and microfluidic physics, biophysics, information optics and nonlinear physics, she is an enthusiastic teacher and supporter for women in science. Beside the hands-on science lab in physics as well as all STEM disciplines she has initiated, she has obtained within a competitive application an additional chair on Gender in Physics since 2016 by the state of Northrine Westfalia, Germany. For these activities, she has achieved a number of awards, among them the women‘s excellence award of the University of Muenster in 2003. In 2012 she was elected professor of the year in natural sciences and medicine by the journal Unicum, a German-wide journal for students.
