Herbert Boerner obtained his PhD for experimental work in High Energy Physics from Bonn University in 1981. After postdoc positions at KEK in Japan and CERN in Geneva he joined Philips research in 1986, first working in the Hamburg laboratory, and from 1995 on in the Aachen laboratory. From this year until his retirement in 2012 he worked on the physics and engineering of organic light emitting diodes (OLED).