Research for Nuclear Arms Control

In June, Malte Göttsche assumes the professor­ship for Peace Research in Natural Sciences created by PRIF and TU Darmstadt as part of the CNTR project. At the same time, the new research group “Science for Nuclear Diplomacy” is established at PRIF under his leadership. With the appoint­ment of Malte Göttsche, PRIF and TU Darmstadt are contribut­ing to the further develop­ment of peace research in the natural and technical sciences in Hesse.

By establishing the professor­ship and the research group, PRIF and TU Darmstadt are following the recommen­dations of the German Council of Science and Humanities from 2019 to strengthen peace and conflict research in the natural sciences. The appoint­ment is part of the joint project “Cluster for Natural and Technical Science Arms Control Research” (CNTR), in which Göttsche will act as a speaker together with Christopher Daase.

This will create a new competence center in Frankfurt and Darmstadt that will contribute physical expertise on arms control to the dialogue with politics and society. PRIF and TU Darmstadt are thus inten­sify­ing their existing co­operation and at the same time establishing 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.