Staff News
New Director at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics
Since 1 February 2011, Prof. Dr Sibylle Günter has taken up her new role as Scientific Director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Garching and Greifswald. She succeeds Prof. Dr Günther Hasinger, who headed the IPP since 2008. Sibylle Günter is a professor of theoretical physics and has been with the IPP for fourteen years already. Her most recent post was head of the research field "Tokamak Theory". She works in the field of theoretical plasma physics with a focus on magnetohydrodynamics and kinetic theory of suprathermal particles. In her new office as director she intends to consolidate even further the two institute parts of the IPP in Garching and Greifswald in order to utilise both these large experiments jointly in the best possible manner.
Born in Rostock in 1964, Sibylle Günter completed her study of physics at the university of her home town in 1987 with a diploma and earned her PhD three years later. After periods of research at the University of Maryland and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the USA, Sibylle Günter habilitated at the University of Rostock in 1996 with a thesis on "Optical Characteristics of Dense Plasmas" and then joined the IPP in Garching. The youngest woman in the history of the Max Planck Society to be appointed a Scientific Member at that time, she took over management of the IPP Tokamak Physics Division in 2000. Since 2001, she teaches as an adjunct professor at the University of Rostock and since 2006, she is honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich.
