Michael Thoennessen, since 1998 full professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, obtained his MS in Physics in 1985 from the University of Cologne, Germany, and his Ph.D. in 1988 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. Michael then joined the Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research at ORNL, Oak Ridge, as a Research Associate. He currently is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and Associate Director for User Relations, at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
The author and co-author of more than 450 scholarly publications, as well as Supervisory Editor of the journal Nuclear Physics A, focuses his research on experimental nuclear physics.
He is involved in the Discovery of Nuclides Project, a literature search to document the discovery of all isotopes, started in 2007 and published in a series of papers in the journal Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables.
Among others he was awarded the William Elgin Wickenden Award of the American Society for Engineering Education in 1999, the GENCO (GSI Exotic Nuclei Community) Membership Award in 2009 and the Division of Nuclear Physics Mentoring Award of the American Physical Society in 2012. He has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2005.
