Background
Selke, Walter was born on May 11, 1947 in Hannover, Germany. Son of Johann Selke and Elisabeth Riekenberg.
physicist university professor
Selke, Walter was born on May 11, 1947 in Hannover, Germany. Son of Johann Selke and Elisabeth Riekenberg.
Master of Science, Georgia Technology, Atlanta, 1970. Diploma, Hannover University, Germany, 1972. Doctor of Philosophy, Hannover University, Germany, 1975.
Habilitation, Saarbruecken University, Germany, 1980.
He held a similar position at the International Business Machines Corporation Research Center (Zürich) in 1985/1986. Since 1996 he is a university professor at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, and he is also, since 2008, engaged in the "Jülich Aachen Research Alliance" (JARA). In 2012, he retired from his teaching duties.
His main field of expertise is Statistical Physics, with applications, especially, to magnetism and surface physics.
He is best known for his work on commensurate and incommensurate spatially modulated superstructures in solids, with realizations in magnets, ferroelectrics, alloys and adsorbate systems He has published about 150 scientific papers in journals, conference proceedings, monographs and books, including many review articles
Among his coauthors are Kurt Binder, Michael East. Fisher, and Valery Pokrovsky. He has (co)organized several workshops and conferences, for instance, in the years 1988 to 1997, a series of meetings with physicists from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, which took place alternately in Germany and Russia.
In the inaugural year 2008, he was named an "Outstanding Referee" by the American Physical Society.
After having received his doctoral degree at the University of Hanover, followed by postdoctoral positions at the Saarland University, Cornell University, and Boston University, he became in 1981 a permanent scientific staff member of Forschungszentrum Jülich. From 1997 to 2000 he was member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Physics.