Prof. Timo Mappes

Timo Mappes is full professor of the History of Physics and founding director of the Deutsches Optisches Museum (D.O.M.).

Timo earned a PhD with great distinction for a dissertation on high resolution X-ray lithography in mechanical engineering from Universität Karlsruhe (TH) in 2006. In 2007 Timo received a grant for an independent junior research group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He enlarged his group to 9 PhD-students & Postdocs. The performance of his group was evaluated with the mark "extraordinarily successful" in 2010. For half a year he was working as visiting professor at Technical University of Denmark, DTU, Denmark in 2010. He was professeur invité to the Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon, France in 2011. In late 2011 Timo Mappes defended his Habilitation at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of KIT for the topic "Microsystem Technology". Timo has authored > 200 publications, among those > 50 ISI cited journal papers of original work (mainly dealing with integrated optofluidic lasers in all-organic chips and novel polymeric resonators). His h-index is 19.
Since 1995 Timo is very active in the history of optics, especially regarding microscopy, e.g. replicating famous experiments with original instruments.

In 2012 Timo joined Carl Zeiss AG, working as Director Microscopic Imaging for Corporate Research and Technology until mid 2015. From Summer 2015 thru Summer 2018 he was acting as Senior Vice President Innovation at Carl Zeiss Vision, heading global Research & Development and Information Technology with procuration. As such he was responsible for the IP portfolio, that experienced a significant boost in grants and applications through his leadership. In addition he introduced a holistic edutainment for point-of-sales solutions.

In July 2018 Timo was appointed full professor and founding director of the German Optical Museum (D.O.M.) to create an internationally recognized research site and interactive museum at Jena.