Frank H. Laukien (born 1960 in Stuttgart, Germany) is a German-American scientist and entrepreneur, the president and CEO of scientific instrument and life-science tools company Bruker Corporation since 2008.
Born and raised in Germany, where he finished his Abitur in 1979, and served as a paratrooper in the Bundeswehr, before he came to the US to study physics at MIT in 1980. He graduated with a B.Sc. in physics in 1984, and then continued with graduate work at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, where he received a Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1988 under Professor William Klemperer.
Dr. Frank Laukien joined Bruker in the US in 1988, focusing on the commercial development of the US and Japanese markets, and on R&D in life-science mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. He and his teams contributed market-changing, disruptive innovations which have included actively-shielded NMR magnets, novel NMR CryoProbes, the novel MALDI Biotyper platform for rapid, universal identification in microbiology, ultra-high field NMR magnet technology for structural biology, and most recently trapped ion mobility spectrometry (TIMS) for 4D proteomics.
Dr. Laukien is an inventor in mass spectrometry, NMR and superconducting magnet technology with numerous patents. His present focus is on proteomics and metabolomics, structural biology, microbiology and infectious disease diagnostics, as well as superconducting materials and magnets.
Frank Laukien also is a scientific author with various publications in applied physics and chemical physics, and he has written a book 'Evolution 4.0' on actively accelerated biological evolution.