Prof. Dr. Michael Kaschke was elected President of the Stifterverband (Association for the Promotion of Science and Humanities in Germany) in January 2022. He is also Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Shareholder of Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG, Member of the Supervisory Board of Robert Bosch GmbH, and a Member of the Management Board of Ottobock Management SE. From 2011 – 2020, Michael Kaschke was President and CEO of Carl ZEISS AG. Prior to this appointment, he served as Member of the Executive Board starting in 2000.

Michael Kaschke is also an Honorary Professor at the Electrical Engineering and Information Technology department at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he gives lectures on subjects such as optical medical technology and innovation process management. He received an honorary doctorate from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 2018 and he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the Medical University of Vienna in 2020. He was elected to be a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Halle, Germany in 2021. From 2014 to 2020, he was a Member of the German Council of Science and Humanities, one of Germany's most important scientific-political advisory committees.

Michael Kaschke was born on 18 June 1957. He studied physics in Jena, earned the title of Dr. rer. nat. in 1986, and then became Dr. sc. nat. in 1988. He conducted research into areas such as the generation of ultra-short laser pulses and their application in physical chemistry and in medicine.

Milestones in his career