Curt Brunnée (24 May 1928 – 14 December 2023) was a German physicist known for his contributions to the field of mass spectrometry instrumentation.
[3] Brunnée grew up in Rostock, his father was a dentist and his grandfather had a factory in Göttingen that produced optical instruments.
[1] He entered the Universität Rostock in 1946, but fled in 1948 due to the increasingly repressive climate in eastern Germany, crossing the boundary between the Soviet occupation zone and the west illegally.
[1] He then enrolled at the Universität Marburg, where he obtained his degree in physics in 1952 and completed his PhD in 1955 in the laboratory of Wilhelm Walcher, who used a sector mass spectrometer for isotope separation.
In 1988 he was promoted to worldwide research director of the Finnigan Instrument Corporation and retired in 1991.