Prof. Dr.
Michael Kramer

Michael Kramer graduated in Physics in Cologne and Bonn, and obtained a PhD at the University of Bonn in 1995. He was a staff astronomer at MPIfR (1996-1998), a Max-Planck Otto-Hahn fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (1998-1999), Lecturer (1999-2003), Senior Lecturer (2003-2005), Reader (2005-2006) and Professor (2006-) at the University of Manchester. He acted as Associate Director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory (2007-2009), bevor he was appointed as Director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio astronomy in Bonn, in 2009. Since 2011 he is Honorar-Professor at the University of Bonn. He won an ERC Advanced Grant in 2008, an ERC Synergy Grant in 2013, and was member to the ERC Scientific Council from 2015 to 2021. His expertise lies in data intensive radio astronomy with a focus on the observations of pulsars for experimental tests of gravitational physics. For his work, he received a number of awards, including the Marcel-Grossmann Award in 2009, the Academy Award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science in 2010, and in 2013 the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration he was co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2019, the Bruno-Rossi Prize 2020 and the Einstein Medal 2020 for the first image of a black hole.