"A magic dwells in each beginning" / "Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne" - this famous line of the poem "Stufen", written by Hermann Hesse over 80 years ago, comes to my mind when posting a bittersweet update here. After over 16 years of independent research and teaching at the physics department of Universität Regensburg, my Heisenberg grant and with that my last university employment contract runs out.
The years in Regensburg included the Emmy Noether grant of the DFG, being PI in two Collaborative Research Centres (SFB) and one Graduate Research Training Group (GRK), a successful large equipment grant, the habilitation, the Walter Schottky Prize of the German Physical Society, and the Heisenberg scholarship of the DFG with positive evaluation. In addition, I have independently supervised 7 PhD students and 27 MSc or diploma students, and developed and conducted both undergraduate and graduate lectures. Third-party research funding from my grants at Universität Regensburg amounts to approximately € 2.6M, of which € 2.1M was for grants solely within my research group, the rest part of larger collaborations.
Over the years, my research group in Regensburg has among other things successfully built up ultra-clean carbon nanotube devices for electronics and nano-electromechanics, the fabrication of high-Q superconducting coplanar electronics and milli-Kelvin microwave measurements, the transfer of carbon nanotubes into complex devices, the first ever microwave optomechanics experiment with a carbon nanotube, and Coulomb blockade spectroscopy of MoS2 nanotubes.
The hardest part of all this time was that without a permanent contract ever the options for acquisition of further grants and independent development of collaborations were severely limited. At the same time one builds up a complex experiment and develops cutting edge techniques without clear perspective. And while the mental model for someone below the professorial level to be an independent group leader and grow sustainably in an academic and professional sense does not really exist in the Regensburg physics department, excellence in exactly this is requested and required by the referees of the various grant programs.
With the high-level DFG money, I have never really been "akademisches Prekariat". However, I fully support initiatives such as PD Prekär and #IchBinHanna which try to ameliorate the situation of researchers in Germany not yet on a permanent professorship. In experimental physics, an unpaid PD working alone at home is of course unthinkable.
I enjoyed university research and teaching as well as working with students, establishing a research group, quantum device fabrication, and complex measurements very much. With the "orderly shutdown" of the group comes that still some students need to graduate and that probably some results will still be written up as papers; however, my office has already been cleared out. I would like to thank everyone who was supportive, in particular also Pertti Hakonen and Milena Grifoni. Nevertheless, it's probably at some point now time to make a bonfire out of those lecture notes, go out into the world and do something entirely new. Which, barring surprises, most likely won't involve physics or a university anymore. I'm lucky in the sense that I'm single and have so far no family or kids to care of.
Time for a gap year and some serious world travel.
