Stefan Funk

Stefan Funk (born in Heidelberg in 1974) is a German astroparticle physicist. He is a (W3-)professor at the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics^[1] at the FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg in Germany and an elected fellow of the American Physical Society since 2015.^[2]

Life and scientific work[]

Stefan Funk studied physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1996 to 2002. Subsequently, he worked as a PhD student in the gamma-ray astrophysics group of Prof. Werner Hofmann at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg, where he received his PhD from Heidelberg University in 2005. The work of his doctoral thesis is the commissioning and characterisation of the central trigger system of the High-energy stereoscopic system (H.E.S.S.) gamma-ray telescopes and the survey of the Galactic plane with H.E.S.S. at TeV energies.^[3]

From 2006 to 2007 Funk worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California as a postdoctoral researcher on GLAST (later Fermi-LAT), a NASA satellite that was launched on June 11, 2008, working with Roger Blandford, Elliott Bloom and Persis Drell. In 2007, he was selected to become assistant professor in the Physics department at Stanford University and the SLAC National accelerator center and in 2013 was promoted to associate professor with tenure at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. During that time, Funk was a group leader in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology on high-energy astrophysics with the Fermi-LAT satellite.

Returning to Germany in 2014 to accept a faculty position (W3) at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg, he became the acting director of the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics (ECAP). Scientifically, he continued his work on H.E.S.S. and the Fermi-LAT, but also focussed more on research and development for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). For CTA Funk's group is developing camera electronics, and he was the elected science coordinator in 2018-2019.^[4]

Funk works as a referee for various national and international agencies and for various scientific journals.

Main research areas[]

Stefan Funk’s area of research^[5] is high energy astrophysics and astroparticle physics, in particular the search for the origin of cosmic rays using gamma rays and the understanding of the particle nature of dark matter. More recently, Funk has turned to laboratory astrophysics where astrophysical processes are reproduced in laboratory settings and to topics in astro quantum optics, such as super-high angular resolution optical intensity interferometry.

Distinctions and awards[]

Funk is a recipient of IUPAP’s 2009 Shakti P. Duggal Award to recognise outstanding work by a young scientist in the field of cosmic ray physics.^[6] In 2010, he received the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society with the H.E.S.S. team and in 2011 with the Fermi-LAT team.^[7] He is a Thompson Reuters highly-cited researcher in 2015 and 2016^[8][9] and an elected APS Fellow since 2016.^[2]

Publications (selection)[]

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References[]