Johannes Stark

Johannes Stark (German: [joˈhanəs ˈʃtaʁk] ^ⓘ; 15 April 1874 – 21 June 1957) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields". This phenomenon is known as the Stark effect.

Stark received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich in 1897 under the supervision of Eugen von Lommel, and served as Lommel's assistant until his appointment as a lecturer at the University of Göttingen in 1900. He was an extraordinary professor at Leibniz University Hannover from 1906 until he became a professor at RWTH Aachen University in 1909. In 1917, he became professor at the University of Greifswald, and he also worked at the University of Würzburg from 1920 to 1922.

A supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1924, Stark was one of the main figures, along with fellow Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, in the antisemitic Deutsche Physik movement, which sought to remove Jewish scientists from German physics. He was appointed head of the German Research Foundation in 1933 and was president of the Reich Physical-Technical Institute from 1933 to 1939. In 1947 he was found guilty as a "Major Offender" by a denazification court.