Max-Born-Institut Berlin (MBI)

56
Gustav Born, The William
Harvey Research Institute,
London, United Kingdom
Paul Corkum, National
Research Council of Canada,
Ottawa, Canada
Knut Urban
Institut für Festkörperphysik
Jülich, Germany
Max Born
Short biographies of the authors
Gustav Victor Rudolf Born was born in Göttingen in 1921 as the son of Max Born (Nobel laureate
in Physics 1954). In 1933 the Born family was forced to leave Germany and settled in Britain.
Gustav Born obtained his medical degree at Edinburgh University and his research doctorate
in Oxford. During his long and distinguished academic career, Born has held chairs of pharmacology
at the Royal College of Surgeons, at Cambridge University, and at King's College London.
At present he is Research Professor at the William Harvey Research Institute in London.
Born has made outstanding contributions to knowledge of the pathophysiology of the circulation,
particularly of haemostasis, thrombosis and atherogenesis. His many honours include the
Fellowship and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and nine honorary doctorates. Göttingen
University awarded him the Albrecht von Haller Medal. Married to the physician Faith Born,
Gustav Born has five children and nine grandchildren.
Paul Corkum was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. He graduated from Lehigh University
(USA) in 1972 with a Ph. D. in theoretical physics. In 1973 he joined the staff of the
National Research Council of Canada. At NRC he concentrated first on laser technology and
then on using intense laser pulses to study and control matter. Dr. Corkum is best known for
introducing many of the concepts in strong field atomic and molecular science and then confirming
them experimentally. Dr. Corkum is the program leader of the Atomic, Molecular and
Optical Science Group at NRC. He is a member of the Royal Societies of London and of Canada.
Among his awards are the Canadian Association of Physicists’ gold medal for lifetime
achievement in Physics (1996), the Royal Society of Canada’s Tory award (2003), the Optical
Society’s Charles Townes award (2005) and the IEEE’s Quantum electronics award (2005). He
will receive the American Physical Society’s Arthur L Schawlow prize in 2006.
Knut Wolf Urban was born in Stuttgart in 1941. He studied physics at the Technical University
of Stuttgart where he also got his doctor degree in natural sciences. Stations of his research
career were the Max-Planck-Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart and the Section de
Recherche de Metallurgie Physique in Saclay, France. In 1984 he became a Professor in Materials
Science at the University of Erlangen. Since 1987 he holds a Chair for Experimental Physics
at RWTH Aachen University. In the same year he founded the Institute for Microstructure
Research at the Research Centre Jülich. Urban’s research interests range from applied superconductivity
and complex metallic alloys to oxides. In 2003 he founded the Ernst Ruska
Centre as Germany’s first user centre in ultra high resolution electron microscopy employing
aberration-corrected electron optics, a field which Urban and his colleagues have pioneered
since 1991. Urban held a number of honorary posts in German science. He was Physics Chairman
of the renowned Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte. Currently he is President
of the German Physical Society.