Prof. Dr. Michael Bau

Prof Dr. Michael Bau, Professor of Geosciences m.bau@jacobs-university.de

https://www.jacobs-university.de/erde-program/faculty

https://www.jacobs-university.de/directory/mbau

Some personal information:

I was born in 1960 in a town called Opladen that is now part of Leverkusen (yes, Leverkusen is the city with the 2nd best football team in Germany (after Werder, of course) and that is dominated by the Bayer company, - but it no longer smells as it did when I was a kid).

After school I did my mandatory army service (not the happiest time of my life) and then moved to Aachen where I studied Geology. If I had the time to travel, I did that... three-months-internship in Australia with a gold exploration company plus 3 months travel all over Australia with a 20 years-old car; 3 months geological mapping in Ireland with lots of rain and Guiness; 3 months fieldwork at Mt. Arayat Volcanoe plus travelling in the Philippines, and so on, and so on...

At first my parents were not too happy with my decision to become a geologist and the running gag of friends and family was a dialogue such as:

„And what are YOU doing?“

„I study geology.“

„Theology? Wow – who would have thought!“

Nevertheless, my parents gave me a lot of support, and I made some money for travelling from playing handball and from working as a truck driver one day per week.

This all ended when I moved to West-Berlin in January of 1989 and started to work on my Ph.D. project at the Hahn-Meitner-Insitute, a large government research facility. Living in West-Berlin was a great, though strange experience that grew even stranger in the fall of 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and everything changed.

I finished my Ph.D. in geochemistry (this time travelling focused on South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia) and then worked as a Post-Doc at the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, a brandnew research institute for the geosciences with a unique mix of East-Germans, West-Germans and Non-Germans.

Apparently this was not yet adventurous enough, as I married my long-time girlfriend and eventually our two sons, Jonas and Finn, we born in 1994 and 1998.

In 1999 we moved to State College, Pennsylvania (USA) where I worked as a Senior Research Associate at the NASA-Penn State Astrobiology Research Center, before coming back to Germany in 2003 and picking up a professorship in Geosciences here at IUB/Jacobs.

We now live in Lesum not far from campus and I still like travelling, reading, canoeing and playing handball and I dislike running, bicycling and swimming...