Dr. Manfred Holz

Dr. Manfred Holz.

I am born in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, in the Palatinate (region) in Germany and I grew up in Hettenleidelheim (Palatine).Thus I am a native “Palatine” and visited the Gymnasium ( high school) in Frankenthal (Palatinate). Later, I studied physics at the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT) and since over forty years I live in the vicinity of Karlsruhe (Baden-Wuerttemberg).

I got the degree “ Diplom-Physiker” (diploma thesis on the development of a quartz-controlled pulse program generator for NMR Spectrometers in 1966.(The supervisor of the thesis was Prof. Günther Laukien, who founded the famous Bruker company.)

I worked from 1966-1970 in the industry (Bruker) and was in the group which, already in 1966, built the worldwide first commercially available NMR pulse spectrometers. The novelty of these research instruments was that one frequency source, the "Master Quartz”, controlled both, namely the pulse program and also the transmitter frequency and allowed so to "synchronized" both. This concept allowed later completely novel NMR experiments with adjustable fixed phase relations between the transmitter frequency during different rf-pulses. These types of devices are today the instrumental basis of all modern " nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers", or "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) instruments, very common in medicine today.- – In 1970 I returned to the University of Karlsruhe at the Institute of Physical Chemistry, finished 1973 my doctor thesis under the supervision of Prof. Hermann Gerhard Hertz (the grandnephew of Heinrich Hertz) on the application of NMR relaxation to questions in connection with the hydrophobic effects and Hofmeister series.--- Thereafter I worked for many years at this Institution together with Prof. Hermann Gerhard Hertz in teaching and research work.

After the retirement of Prof. H. G. Hertz in 1990 I took over the management of his "NMR laboratory" at the Institute of Physical Chemistry and continued through a variety of own research projects and developed the so-called "electrophoretic NMR". In recent years I worked mainly within a "research group" funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) aiming at the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance methods in engineering sciences. -In the year 2001 I also retired, but you can still meet me from time to time at the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT). My special, methodical work area was and is the general field of "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance", which is also the basis of magnetic resonance imaging MRI. Therefore I contributed to the German NMR spectroscopy article in de. Wikipedia.

Since,in particular, as already mentioned, I worked in the area of field gradient NMR by methodological development work and I was the pioneer in the area "Electrophoretic NMR" (ENMR), thus developping a technique in which NMR experiments are performed in the presence of an electric current within the examined NMR sample. Thus ENMR allows the contactless observation and study E.g. of the migration of electrically charged particles,like ions, in an electric field in the inner of liquids or porous media.------- I have also intensively studied the micro-dynamics and micro-structure of pure liquids, liquid solutions and mixtures, as molecular diffusion and molecular rotation , such as in water (see E.g. properties of water) and in aqueous solutions, using NMR techniques. I devoted a large part of my research, to the, in the life sciences very important, phenomena, in aqueous solutions, namely the "Hydrophobic effects", such as "hydrophobic hydration" and "hydrophobic association".

The results of my scientific work are laid down in more than 100 publications, which you can find on my Web page. My website is: http://www.ipc.kit.edu/mik/14_506.php

One of my hobbies is photography, in particular I love motifs from my old home country, the Palatinate, and so you will find some photos of mine in the German (Pfalz (Region) and the English Palatinate (region) article.

I am by the way the ten years older brother of the well known German painter Werner Holz (see e.g.: https://sites.google.com/site/wernerholztheatrummundi/), He died unfortunately as early as 1991. Since I know very well his life, career and his works, I have edited for this reason the German Wikipedia article Werner Holz