Willibald Jentschke

Who was Willibald Jentschke?

Willibald Jentschke was an Austrian-German experimental nuclear physicist.

During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project.

After World War II, he emigrated to the United States to work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, for the Air Force Materiel Command. In 1950, he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he became director of the Cyclotron Laboratory there in 1951.

In 1956, he became a professor of physics at the University of Hamburg and spearheaded the effort to build the 7.5 GeV electron synchrotron DESY, the foundation of which was in December 1959. He was director of DESY for 10 years. In 1971, he became Director General of CERN Laboratory I for the next five years. He retired from the University of Hamburg in 1980.