Fritz Merkle
Fritz Merkle https://asteroidday-uploads.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/26152522/fritz_merkle-1.jpg 480 270 Asteroid Day https://asteroidday-uploads.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/26152522/fritz_merkle-1.jpgAsteroid Day Affiliation:
He has Diploma Degree and Doctorate in Applied Physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany
After joining OHB in 2000 he served from 2000 on for OHB as Member of the Executive Board of OHB System AG responsible for defense programs, advanced studies and business development and in addition since August 2014 on the Executive Board of the OHB SE responsible for business development and strategy of the group of OHB companies. On June 30, 2018, he retired from the Executive Boards.
From 1993 until 2000, he was Vice-President of Carl Zeiss and in charge of the Space Technology and Astronomical Instrument Division. To his responsibility counted projects like X-ray optics for the XMM Newton satellite, optics for Meteosat Second Generation Satellites, SILEX Optical Communication Terminals, and optical subsystems for the ground-based large telescopes like VLT, Gemini, and several other activities.
Prior to this, he worked as Systems Engineer with European Southern Observatory, responsible for the optical system, active and adaptive optics and long baseline interferometry of the European Very Large Telescope (ESO-VLT).
In the mid 80’s was Visiting Scientist at IBM Almaden Research, San Jose, CA, USA. Following an Assistant Professorship in Applied Physics at University of Heidelberg, Germany.
He is Member of the DLR Senate, Boards of Trustees of Max Planck and Fraunhofer Institutes, and the Board of Directors of the US Space Foundation. Further, he is Full Member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), Member of AIAA, SPIE, DGaO (German Society for Applied Optics), and DPG (German Physical Society).
In the academic part of his career he contributed to more than 100 refereed and contributed papers to national and international journals, conference proceedings, etc. and is co-author of several books.
