Nuclear arms control, verification and disarmament require physical expertise; changing political circumstances and new technologies bring new challenges. In order to strengthen basic research and policy advice at the interface between physics and peace and conflict research, CNTR has established a professorship for Peace Research in Natural Sciences at TU Darmstadt. The newly created professorship will now be filled by Prof. Dr. Malte Göttsche as of June. Göttsche will also head the new research group “Science for Nuclear Diplomacy” at PRIF, which will be the third research group to complement the CNTR project. Together with Prof. Dr. Christopher Daase, he will act as CNTR speaker.
A new competence centre is being created along with the professorship and the research group that will contribute technological expertise to the dialogue with politics and society. PRIF and TU Darmstadt are thus intensifying their existing cooperation and at the same time creating career opportunities for early career researchers in the field of interdisciplinary peace and conflict research. With the appointment of Malte Göttsche, a recognized expert in the field of physical peace and conflict research and nuclear arms control has been recruited.
Malte Göttsche will remain Assistant Professor of Nuclear Verification and Disarmament at RWTH Aachen University until the end of May. There he heads the BMBF-funded joint project VeSPoTec, which conducts interdisciplinary research on verification and nuclear arms control. Work on this project is also to be continued in Darmstadt and Frankfurt. Prior to this, he was a research associate at Princeton University. With his research into nuclear archaeology – funded in Aachen by a Freigeist Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation – he has made a significant contribution to the further development of verification methods. This innovative approach helps to establish whether a country has actually declared its entire stockpiles of weapons-grade material. Malte Göttsche was awarded the Nuclear-Free Future Award in 2022. He participated in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings 2019 and was a member of Junges Kolleg of the NRW Academy of Sciences and Arts.
