After living in England from 1934 to 1949, Prof. Dr. Klaus F. Hasselmann studied physics and mathematics in Hamburg. From 1955 to 1957 he worked at the Max Planck Institute of Fluid Dynamics in Göttingen, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1957. Having obtained his postdoctoral lecturing qualification in 1963 with the University of Hamburg, he became Professor at and later Director of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of Hamburg. He then worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and from 1970 to 1972 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts before being appointed, in 1972, full Professor of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Hamburg. From 1975 to 1999 he was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and from 1988 to 1999 Scientific Director at the German High Performance Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research, both in Hamburg. Since 1999 he has worked as Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.
His honours and awards include the Sverdrup Medal from the American Meteorological Society (1971), the Nansen Polar Bear Award (1993), the “Umweltpreis” from the Bundesstiftung Umwelt (1998), the Karl Küpfmüller-Ring (1999), an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia (2000), the Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal (2002) from the European Geophysical Union and Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2009) from Spain’s BBVA Foundation, The Nobel Prize in Physics (2021).