Daniel Rolles

Daniel Rolles is a Professor of Physics at Kansas State University and Associate Director for Research at the J. R. Macdonald Laboratory at K-State. His research interests include ultrafast atomic and molecular physics and gas-phase photochemistry experiments with X-rays and femtosecond lasers. He obtained his PhD from the Technical University Berlin in 2005 for research performed at the Fritz Haber Institute and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. After postdoctoral research in Berkeley, he joined the Max Planck Advanced Study Group at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg in 2008. Subsequently, he led a Helmholtz junior research group at DESY before being appointed as an Assistant Professor in Physics at Kansas State University in 2015. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020 and to Full Professor in 2024. In 2024, he was also elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society “for pioneering experiments on imaging ultrafast molecular reactions with XUV and X-ray free-electron lasers, and for advancing our understanding of the interaction of ultra-intense X-ray pulses with atoms and molecules”.