Geerd Heinrich Friedrich Diercksen (25 March 1936 in Hannover) is a German theoretical chemist and a pioneer in computational chemistry. In 1963 he was awarded his PhD, supervised by Heinz-Werner Preuß at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, in 1973 he was awarded his habilitation in Chemistry by the Technische Universität München and in 1983 he was appointed professor (apl. Professor). From 1965 to 2001 he worked as scientific staff at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik and since 2001 he works there as scientist emeritus.
Education
Geerd Diercksen graduated (Abitur) in spring 1956 at the Luther-Schule in Hannover. Directly afterwards he started to study chemistry, mathematics and physics at the Technische Hochschule Hannover (since 2006: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover) and graduated in autumn 1961 in chemistry (Diplom Chemiker). His interest in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry was raised during a course held by Werner Fischer and firmly established by attending a Summer School organised by Per-Olov Löwdin in 1960 at Uppsala University.
After graduation in Hannover he started his PhD studies supervised by Heinz-Werner Preuß at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, and in autumn 1963 he was awarded his PhD (Dr. phil. nat). Directly afterwards he started post-doctoral work at Keele University supervised by Roy McWeeny. In spring 1965 he accepted an offer by Ludwig Biermann to join the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik und Astrophysik in Munich (since 1991: Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching) as Scientific Staff. In 1973 he was awarded Habilitation in Chemistry by the Technische Universität München and in 1983 he was appointed there Professor (apl. Professor). Since his retirement in 2001 he is working at the MPA as Scientist emeritus.
Biography
At the Max-Planck-Institute Diercksen established a worldwide network of scientific cooperations. In particular, he provided many colleagues from Eastern Europe with the opportunity to work as guest researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute and to establish contact with colleagues from Western Europe, the Americas and Asia. He hosted nine Humboldt Research Fellows. With one of them, Tokuei Sako (Nihon University, Campus Funabashi, Chiba), he was connected for many years after his retirement by a close, successful cooperation. In addition he hosted five Humboldt Research Award Winners: Włodzimierz Kołos (University of Warsaw), Turgay Uzer (Georgia Institute of Technology), Michael Zerner (University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.), Josef Paldus (University of Waterloo, ONT) and Enrico Clementi (Como).
As visiting scientist he has spent one year each at the IBM Research Laboratories in San Jose, California, and at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and six months at the Hokkaido University in Sapporo. As Research Award Winner of five partner organisations of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, he has spent one year each at the University of Waterloo and at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, at the University of São Paulo (USP), and six months at the University of Tokyo. Within the framework of his scientific cooperations he has visited repeatedly up to several month partner institutions, among others in Brasil, Chile, Canada, Great Britain, India, Japan, Poland, Sweden, the Slovak Republic, Venezuela, Uruguay and the USA. In 1969 he started, jointly with Alain Veillard (University of Strasbourg), the tri-annual Series of European Seminars on Computational Methods in Quantum Chemistry.
From 1985 to 2000 Diercksen served as editor of Computer Physics Communications, from 2002 to 2009 as German Representative in the COST Technical Committee: Telecommunication, Information Science and Technology, from 2001 to 2005 as chairman of the Management Committee of the ICT COST Action 282 Knowledge Exploration in Science and Technology, and from 2002 to 2004 as Scientific Advisor of the Project IST-2001-37238 Open Computing GRID for Molecular Science and Engineering within the 5th EU Framework Programme
Diercksen is Member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft der Humboldtianer e.V. (Humboldt-Club) and of the Deutsche Gesellschaft der JSPS-Stipendiaten e.V. (JSPS-Club).