Horst Stöcker
(A Brief Biographical Sketch)
Professor Horst Stöcker was born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, on 16 December 1952. After graduating from Goethe University, Frankfurt, in 1976, with a Diploma from the Institute for Theoretical Physics, he pursued his doctoral studies with Professor Walter Greiner and received his Ph.D. from Goethe University in 1979.
From 1979 to 1982, Dr. Stöcker was a Postdoc at the GSI in Darmstadt, the national laboratory (today "Helmholtz-Center") for Heavy ion Physics. 1980 to 1981, he was, as a DAAD NATO Fellow, a visiting fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA, USA. He continued his research as an assistant Professor at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University, MI, USA, from 1982 to 1985. In 1985, he accepted the offer for the Professorship for Theoretical Physics at his Alma Mater, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. There he holds the endowed Judah M. Eisenberg Professor Laureatus Chair of the Fachbereich Physik and the WGG.
Prof. Stöcker was three times elected Vicepresident of Goethe University. He founded, together with Profs. Walter Greiner and Wolf Singer, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in 2004, as the founding Director, and is a Senior Fellow there. He was Scientific Director of GSI from 2007 to 2015, where he founded the International "Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, FAIR in Europe, in 2010. He was twice elected Vicepresident of the Helmholtz Gemeinschaft, Bonn.
He held numerous visiting professorships at many universities and scientific institutions world-wide.
Prof. Stöcker was awarded "Fellow of Institute of Physics", London, and "Fellow of the European Physical Society".
He is a Honorary Doctor at several Academies and Research Institutes, a Member of the Academia Europaea, and an Honorary Member of the Academia Romania.
Professor Stöcker is renown for his many outstanding contributions to nuclear science during the last 50 years. His pioneering works in High Energy Heavy Ion Physics and his predictions of compressed, hot nuclear matter and exotic phases in QCD matter, relativistic van der Waals theory and chiral - and relativistic non-linear mean field theory of hyper matter, antimatter and their creation by nuclear shock waves stimulated many experimental collaborations' works.
In particular, the predicted sensitivity of observables, like collective flow and triple differential hadron spectra, in his newly developed models of the spatiotemporal evolution of the colliding nuclear system, like macroscopic relativistic fluid dynamic models, as well as relativistic microscopic models, such as Vlasov- Uehling Uhlenbeck theory and relativistic quantum molecular dynamics, UrQMD, yielded sensitive observables for high energy heavy ion collision experiments at BEVALAC@LBL, AGS and RHIC@BNL, SPS and LHC@CERN.
Prof. Stöcker and his students and colleagues published more than 600 papers, with over 40 000 citations and a Hirsch Index of above 90.
Professor Stöcker authored and co-authored textbooks on physics and mathematics, which were translated into 7 languages and sold more than 100 000 times.
During the last five decades, Prof. Stoecker educated many young physicists, 20 of his former students hold professorships for theoretical physics world-wide.