About ...

… Feiner Services

Feiner Services is a convenient umbrella term for the ventures of the free­lance physicist Franz Feiner, Ph.D. Founded on Sep­tem­ber 16, 2004 in Munich it is now lo­cated in the small Upper Ba­varian vil­lage Pürgen not far from Lake Ammer and next to Lands­berg am Lech (where Johnny Cash formed his first band "The Lands­berg Barbarians").

… Franz Feiner

I am a di­versely in­ter­ested om­nivo­rous reader who likes to fig­ure out how things work and how tech­ni­cal goals can be achieved with simple means. I started early in life to ex­plore de­vices: As a pre­school child I liked to dis­as­sem­ble me­chani­cal alarm clocks and learned to re­as­sem­ble and re­pair them. When I was re­ceiving se­cond­ary edu­ca­tion, I started to teach my­self coding and elec­tronics with single-board com­puters. And then I found the ulti­mate tool­kit for di­sas­sem­bling and re­as­sem­bling the uni­verse: mathe­matics and physics. This leads us to …

… my Scientific Background

I studied ex­peri­mental physics at Lud­wigs-Ma­xi­mi­lians-Uni­ver­si­tät in Munich. As se­cond­ary sub­jects I chose physical chemis­try and elec­tronics — in­or­ganic chemis­try as well as mathe­matics being anyway in­te­gral parts of the study of physics.

Working on my di­ploma thesis on the sub­ject of in­ter­mo­lec­ular forces, I built a piezo-driven de­vice for bring­ing two sur­faces into close prox­imity (nano­meter-range dis­tance) and de­vel­oped an op­ti­cal method for meas­uring the forces acting be­tween these sur­faces as well as all the volt­age sources, sig­nal-con­di­tion­ing (e.g., a lock-in am­pli­fier) and con­trol elec­tronics (e.g., a small com­puter to pro­gram the step se­quences of the piezo actuators).

As postgraduate student I spent a term at the Tech­nical Uni­ver­sity of Munich learn­ing the basics of Fou­rier trans­form in­fra­red spec­tros­copy and gel electro­phoresis.

Returning to Lud­wigs-Ma­xi­mi­lians-Uni­ver­si­tät I be­came a re­searcher in non­linear optics in­ves­ti­gat­ing fre­quency dou­bling of near-in­fra­red light in­ter­act­ing with or­ganic mole­cules (sec­ond har­monic gen­er­a­tion). This was also the sub­ject of my Ph.D. thesis. Again, I built all the nec­es­sary elec­tron­ics (e.g., a boxcar averager) and also di­verse op­ti­cal ele­ments (e.g., a Raman shifter).

… my Additional Skills

Before I em­barked on my study of physics I was a radio op­er­a­tor in the German armed forces and in the en­su­ing al­ter­na­tive service at the Max Planck In­sti­tute of Psy­chi­a­try I learned to in­ter­pret sleep pat­terns in EEG recordings.

In my first po­si­tion out­side aca­demia I was em­ployed to de­velop and test de­tec­tors for ion­iz­ing radiation.

Then I switched roles and wrote 3D-kitchen-de­sign software.

Changing my oc­cu­pa­tional field once more, I found em­ploy­ment as a sci­en­tist at the Ger­man Fed­eral Of­fice for Ra­di­a­tion Pro­tec­tion where I helped to as­sess the bio­log­i­cal ef­fects of non-ion­iz­ing ra­di­a­tion. This po­si­tion shifted my focus to the med­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tions of physics.

Subse­quently, I was hired by a med­i­cal de­vice com­pany whose main prod­ucts are neb­u­lizers. There my first as­sign­ment was to de­velop aer­o­sol sen­sors and a neb­u­lizer test rig. The sec­ond one was to find new ways to gen­er­ate aerosols.

The last po­si­tion I held as an em­ployee was for an­other med­i­cal de­vice com­pany, where I de­vel­oped an ul­tra­sonic blood flow meter based on the tran­sit-time method.

In my free time I also like to learn about sci­ence-re­lated sub­jects. That's why I love to go to the Deut­sches Mu­seum of Mas­ter­pieces of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy and why I like to give talks on these topics. So, when the op­por­tu­nity arose, I jumped at the chance to de­liver a se­ries of lec­tures at the Lands­berg folk high school on how math­e­matics, sci­ence, and tech­nol­ogy de­vel­oped through the ages and how they in­flu­enced the course of civilization.

… my Freelance Projects: See here.