Wolfgang Sandner is Director General and CEO of the ELI-DC International Association, coordinating the implementation of the project ELI, “Extreme Light Infrastructure”. He graduated in physics from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 1979, and subsequently held professor positions at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg, Germany, and Tennessee, USA. Since 1994 he is Full Professor of Physics at the Technical University Berlin, Germany. From 1993 to 2013 he was Director at the Max Born Institute (MBI) in Berlin. From 2003 to 2013 he coordinated the EU network LASERLAB-EUROPE, comprising 28 major laser Research Infrastructures from 16 European countries. From 2010 to 2012 he was President of the German Physical Society DPG, and is Vice-President until 2014.

    The European project ELI, “Extreme Light Infrastructure”, will be the world's first international user facility in laser research. It is part of the ESFRI Roadmap of international research infrastructures of high priority in Europe, and is presently being constructed with a total investment volume of nearly one billion Euro. ELI will be a distributed facility, initially comprising three research centers in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania, with a fourth pillar holding exawatt-class lasers to be implemented later. ELI will host the world's most powerful lasers, and will focus on novel applications of high-intensity laser light, secondary radiation of photon and particles, attosecond physics, and nuclear photophysics. User operation is expected to start in 2017.