Jan O. Haerter
Jan O. Haerter has a PhD from University of California at Santa Cruz (2007) in theoretical condensed matter physics. He subsequently spent three years as a postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg. In 2011, Jan joined the Center for Models of Life, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, where he worked on a range of complex systems. In 2015, he spent a research visit at the Complexity Lab, University of Barcelona and subsequently returned to the Niels Bohr Institute to build his own research group, Atmospheric Complexity, using a Villum Young Investigator Grant and an ERC Consolidator Grant. In 2020, Jan joined the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and was appointed associate professor of complex systems at Constructor University (formerly: Jacobs University Bremen). In 2023, Jan was announced professor of computational and climate physics at the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam.
Jan is professor for computational and climate physics with currently strong research interests in tropical convection and the associated circulation, especially the self-organization of tropical mesoscale convective systems by cold pools and the interaction with the larger-scale environment through tropical waves. His research interests also encompass complex systems including: condensed matter (e.g., strongly-correlated electron systems), theoretical ecology (e.g., "food web assembly rules"), social networks (e.g., experimental economics), but mostly questions in atmospheric complexity and moist convection.
Jan leads the DakE field campaign in Senegal. Jan teaches the ClEWS courses “Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics”, “Debating Club”, and is course responsible for “Math and Physics”. Jan also teaches the physics graduate course “Advanced Statistical Physics” together with Karoline Wiesner and the masters course “Spatiotemporal emergence and complexity”, offered to the physics masters and ClEWS. Jan serves as head of the ClEWS examination board.