The 2025 Willis E. Lamb Award

Dr. Volker Deckert holds a position as a Full-Professor for Physical Chemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena and jointly heads the nanoscopy department at the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology also in Jena. He obtained his Diploma and PhD from the University of Würzburg (Germany), working in the field of Raman spectroscopy with Prof. Kiefer. He started a small software and consulting company programming and using CCD’s for Raman spectroscopy applications and, at the same time, continued his research as a postdoc at the University of Tokyo and KAST, in Kawasaki, now on non-linear and time-resolved laser spectroscopy. During his habilitation at the ETH Zurich, he started working on all kinds of near-field optical spectroscopy, a subject he pursued at his positions at the TU Dresden and the TU Dortmund and also at his current positions in Jena.
Dr. Deckert is a fellow of the the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Society of Applied Spectroscopy, and a Fellow of Optica. He is a Adjunct Faculty member of the University of Nebraska (Medical Center, Omaha) and was a Research Fellow at the IQSE at Texas A&M, and recently was selected for the Changjiang-Scholarship award. For his achievements in the field of tip-enhanced Raman scattering was awarded the Sofia Kowalewskaya Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2002), the Charles-Mann Award from the Society of Applied Spectroscopy, the Ellis R. Lippincott Award (jointly from OPTICA, SAS, Coblentz Society).