Jochen Mannhart, born 1960 in Metzingen, Germany, is a Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. He studied physics at the University of Tübingen, where he obtained his Masters in 1986 and his PhD in 1987. He then worked as a guest scientist at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, USA, and later as a research associate and manager at the IBM research lab in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. He qualified as a lecturer in Experimental Physics in 1994. From 1996 to 2011 he held the Chair of Experimental Physics VI at the University of Augsburg’s Centre for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism.

His research focuses on key topics in modern solid state physics: Jochen Mannhart was the first to ever produce oxidic field effect transistors, thereby demonstrating the electric field effect in high-temperature superconductors. He is an expert at producing and studying specific interfaces in complex oxides and his goal is to create and control new electronic effects. Jochen Mannhart succeeded in using so-called bicrystal technology to study the grain boundaries in superconductors and to discover fundamental techniques for optimizing cables and electronic components from high-temperature superconductors. He and his team also developed a scanning probe microscope that achieved a record spatial resolution of 77 picometres.

Jochen Mannhart won the Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) in 2008.