Siegfried Glenzer

Siegfried Glenzer is professor in the photon science faculty and the director of the High Energy Density Science (HEDS) division at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He joined SLAC as a distinguished scientist in 2013 to build a new program exploring matter in extreme conditions using high-power lasers and the Linac Coherent Light Source, SLAC's X-ray Free Electron laser. He became faculty member of SLAC’s photon science faculty in 2015 and, by courtesy, at Stanford University’s Mechanical Engineering department in 2021.

Siegfried Glenzer performed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, where he received his PhD with distinction in 1994. He then went to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow and, in time, became the laboratory's group leader for plasma physics. At Livermore, he delivered milestones to complete the Nova technical contract and subsequently led the first inertial confinement fusion experiments on the National Ignition Facility where fusion ignition was demonstrated in 2022. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior Alexander-von-Humboldt research price awardee at the University of Rostock, Germany, and the Deutsche Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. Further, Siegfried Glenzer was named a fellow of the American Physical Society (2001) and was awarded the society’s 2003 and 2022 John Dawson Awards for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. In 2014, he received the Ernest O. Lawrence Award from the U. S. Department of Energy and in 2024 the Fulbright award from the U. S. Department of State. In 2019, he received the honorary Ph.D h.c. from the University of Rostock at the University’s 600 year anniversary celebration and, in 2023, the Secretary of Energy Honor’s Award.