President of TOPTICA Photonics AG Dr. Wilhelm Kaenders visited SIOM and delivered a talk entitled by “Starting-up with Cold Atoms: From the Very Small to the Very Far” on May 5, 2015. About 35 researchers attended the talk and discussed the related research with him.

Dr. Wilhelm Kaenders co-founded TOPTICA Photonics in 1998, and serves as Vorstand/President. He was "infected" with an interest in cold atom physics as a PhD student at the Institute of Quantum Optics in Hannover, closely collaborating with Theodor Hänsch's group at the Max-Planck-Institute in Garching, Munich. Kaenders started TOPTICA with tunable diode-laser technology, still the driving force in TOPTICA's extensive line of scientific products.