Carsten Dominik is full professor at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD in 1992 at the Technical University Berlin on the subject of dust-driven winds from Red Giants. After postdoc positions at NASA Ames as an NRC Research Fellow and at Leiden University, he joined the Anton Pannekoek Institute in 1999. Between 2006 and 2014, he held a special professorship at Radboud University in Nijmegen. Between 2021 and 2025, he was the scientific director of the Anton Pannekoek Institute. He is currently PI of an ERC Advanced Grant GT4Pebbles.
Carsten studies protoplanetary disks, exoplanets and solar system objects. His goal is to understand the physics of planet formation, processes that are happening in protoplanetary disks, and to link these processes to the planetary system architectures that are currently discovered. He focuses on dust particles in disks that can be observed by high-contrast, high-spatial resolution imaging from visual to submillimeter wavelengths and studies how these dust grains grow into comets and planets. Carsten has been teaching many different courses over the years. Currently, he teaches the honors course "The Universe that Made Us".
Protoplanetary disks, planet formation, exoplanets, high-contrast imaging, dust, laboratory science.