Heinz Gerischer

Heinz Gerischer ( born March 31, 1919 in Wittenberg, † 14 September 1994 in Berlin) was a German chemist.

Life and work

Gerischer studied chemistry in Leipzig and in 1946 received his doctorate with a thesis on the periodic processes in the electrolytic dissolution of copper in Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer in hydrochloric acid. He moved to the Humboldt University in Berlin and on to what was then the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry. Later he went to the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, and in 1956 as a lecturer at the University of Stuttgart. He then followed in 1962 a professorship at the Technical University of Munich as a professor of Electrochemistry, 1964, he took over the Institute Director at the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry.

In November 1969 Heinz Gerischer was appointed director of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. He took over the Department of Physical Chemistry and developed a new focus of research in the field of electrochemistry of metals and semiconductors, including photochemical effects. Research on solid surfaces in ultrahigh vacuum and in contact with gases was pursued more vigorously.

Building on the already introduced by Max von Laue in Institute low-temperature matrix isolation spectroscopy technique was accepted as a research area to study at atomic clusters the transition between atomic and solid state properties.

Heinz Gerischer was the doctoral advisor of Nobel laureate Gerhard Ertl, who in 1986 at the Fritz Haber Institute succeeded him.