DESY mourns for Professor Dr. Willibald Jentschke

The "Founding Father of DESY", Prof. Dr. Willibald Jentschke, died on March 11, 2002, only a few months after his 90th birthday, which he had celebrated at DESY.

During the 1950s, as Willibald Jentschke received a call from the University of Hamburg, he coupled his acceptance of a teaching chair in physics with the possibility of research with a modern particle accelerator. As a result, DESY was founded. From 1959 till the end of 1970, Prof. Jentschke had been Head of the DESY Directorate and for many years in parallel, Director of the second Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Hamburg.

Not only in his scientific competence - Jentschke carried out research on nuclear-physical processes at the Universities of Vienna and Illinois (USA) - but also his accessible and motivating leadership style were the origins of his success.

Starting in 1971, Professor Jentschke headed the European Laboratory for Particle Physics CERN near Geneva for five years. In the last years before his retirement, he once again devoted himself entirely to research and teaching at the University of Hamburg and remained actively involved in DESY and science till death.