Adolf Goetzberger

German physicist, born in 1928 and died in 2023, who became one of the founding figures of modern solar energy research. He studied physics in Munich before working alongside William Shockley in Palo Alto and at Bell Labs in the United States. In 1981 Goetzberger founded the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, known as Fraunhofer ISE, in Freiburg im Breisgau, building it into one of the world's leading centers for photovoltaics and solar technology research. His decades of work on solar cells and solar energy systems earned him the nickname the Sun God from the European Patent Office, along with the Becquerel Prize in 1997 and the European Solar Award in 2009, and helped establish Germany as a center of solar research and industry in the late twentieth century.