Dr. Ilja Gerhardt obtained his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin where he did his diploma thesis on optical addressable semiconductor sensors. Afterwards he went to industry as a programmer and founded a computer company.
He then entered graduate school at the University of Konstanz where he worked in the group of Prof. Juergen Mlynek. He later moved to ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and completed his PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar. His PhD is based on cryogenic single molecule near-field experiments and quantum optical properties of cryogenic single emitters. For a postdoctoral stay he moved to the National University of Singapore to focus on the quantum optical aspects of single emitter spectroscopy. After that Ilja Gerhardt went to the MPI in Stuttgart to research on single defect centers in diamond. In this time he also was a visiting scholar in the Chemistry department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Since a call to Hannover Ilja Gerhardt is full professor for solid state physics and quantum sensing at the Leibniz University.
Close contacts to his colleagues in Glasgow have motivated him to join the Joint Forum and to perform research on topics of light-matter interaction.
