Frank H. Laukien

Frank H. Laukien, born in Stuttgart in 1960, grew up in Germany, where he obtained his Abitur as valedictorian, before coming to MIT and the United States as a physics undergraduate student. Today, he is the Chairman, President, and CEO of Bruker Corporation, a company with 7000 employees worldwide that is dedicated to high-performance life-science tools, scientific instrumentation, and diagnostic solutions (Nasdaq: BRKR). He joined Bruker in 1988 and became CEO of Bruker Daltonics in 1997, a company he took public in 2000. Dr. Laukien was named an Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 in New England by E&Y. Frank Laukien holds a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University. In the 1990s, Dr. Laukien was a visiting lecturer in NMR and mass spectrometry at the University of Bremen and later an adjunct professor at the Institute of Mass Spectrometry of the University of Amsterdam. In 2021, he was appointed as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology of Harvard University, where he also is a member of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative and of the Galileo Project. Dr. Laukien has published numerous peer-reviewed papers and is a co-inventor on many scientific instrumentation patents. Previously, he served on the Dean’s Advisory Committee of the School of Science of MIT, and he is currently on the Visiting Committee of the MIT Department of Chemistry. For many years, he served on the Board of the Analytical, Life Science & Diagnostics Association (ALDA), including one year as ALDA chairman. In 2017, Dr. Laukien was elected a senator of acatech, the German Academy of Natural and Technical Sciences. In 2020, he created the podcast series Origins & Evolution with Professor of Astronomy Dimitar Sasselov, the Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. Since 2020, Laukien has been the lead organizer of the Cancer Evolution Symposium and Cancer Evolution Seminar Series, which has been summarized in a special issue on cancer evolution of the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (PBMB), published in October 2021. In August 2021, he became co-chair of the new scientific working group on Cancer Evolution of the American Association for Cancer Research, and since June 2020, Dr. Laukien has also been a member of The Oncology Think Tank (TOTT). Together with lead founder and Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb, in July 2021, Dr. Laukien has become the co-founder of the Galileo Project “for the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts.” Frank lives in New England. He is passionate about basic scientific and medical research for the benefit and advancement of humanity. Frank is an enthusiastic life science innovator and entrepreneur and a devoted father and grandfather. He enjoys hiking, swimming, tennis, and skiing.