Stefan Funk
Stefan Funk is a German astroparticle physicist.
He is a professor at the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics at the FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg in Germany and an elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Life and scientific work
Stefan Funk studied physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1996 to 2002. Subsequently, he worked as a PhD student in the gamma-ray astrophysics group of Werner Hofmann at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physic in Heidelberg, where he received his PhD from Heidelberg University in 2005. The work of his doctoral thesis is the commissioning and characterisation of the central trigger system of the High Energy Stereoscopic System gamma-ray telescopes and the survey of the Galactic plane with H.E.S.S. at TeV energies.From 2006 to 2007 Funk worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, US as a postdoctoral researcher on GLAST, a NASA satellite that was launched on June 11, 2008, working with Roger Blandford, Elliott Bloom and Persis Drell. In 2007, he became an assistant professor in the Physics department at Stanford University and the SLAC National accelerator center. He became Associate Professor with tenure in 2013. During that time, Funk was a group leader in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology working on high-energy astrophysics with the Fermi-LAT satellite.
He returned to Germany in 2014 to work at the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. Scientifically, he continued his work on H.E.S.S. and the Fermi-LAT, but also focussed more on research and development for the Cherenkov Telescope Array. His group is developing camera electronics for CTA and he is also involved in the scientific preparation of the observatory.