Born 1951, in Berlin. Study of physics, doctorate TU Berlin (1978), habilitation in theoretical physics TU Berlin (1984), scientific staff member at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig (1978), Director and Scientific Member at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (1988-2020), since 2020 emeritus, Honorary Professor Technical University Berlin (1989) and Free University Berlin (2001), Distinguished Visiting Professor for Computational Material Science and Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (since 2004).