Prof. Dr. Ilja Gerhardt

Dr. Ilja Gerhardt obtained his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin where he worked on optical addressable semiconductor sensors with Dr. Werner Moritz. Afterwards he went to industry as a programmer and founded a computer company.
He then entered graduate school at the University of Konstanz where he worked in the group of Prof. Juergen Mlynek. He later moved to Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and completed his PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar. His doctoral work is based on cryogenic single molecule near-field optical experiments and quantum optical properties of cryogenic single emitters. As a post-doc he moved to the National University of Singapore to focus on the quantum optical aspects of single emitter spectroscopy and quantum information, most notably on quantum hacking.
In 2010 & 2011 he was a visiting scholar in the Chemistry department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and focused on cold molecules and matrix isolation spectroscopy. At the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart he researched on quantum optics, single defect centers in diamond and quantum optical hybrid systems. Since 2021 he is professor for solid state physics with a special focus on quantum sensing, quantum information and quantum optics.
Ilja Gerhardt is the organizer of several high level conferences on hot atomic vapors and quantum randomness.