Laurens Molenkamp received undergraduate (1980) and graduate (1985) degrees in Physical Chemistry from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, specializing in coherent optical spectroscopy. After completing his PhD, he joined Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where he soon became involved in quantum transport studies in semiconductor-based nanostructures. This remained his field of interest when he moved back into academia, first joining the RWTH in Aachen, Germany, as an associate professor (1994), and subsequently (1999) the University of Würzburg, where he holds the Chair of Experimental Physics 3 and leads the II-VI MBE unit. His research currently revolves around quantum transport and semiconductor spintronics, combining nanolithography and low temperature transport experiments with the specialized semiconductor epitaxy available at Würzburg.

For his scientific work he won many awards, among them the European Physical Society Europhysics Prize (2010), the Oliver E. Buckley Prize (2012), the Frontier Physics Prize (2013), the DFG’s Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize (2014), the King Faisal International Prize (2017) and the Stern-Gerlach-Medal by the German Physical Society (2017)