Theodor Förster (15 May 1910 – 20 May 1974) was a German physical chemist known for theoretical work on light-matter interaction in molecular systems such as fluorescence and resonant energy transfer.
[2] He then joined Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer as a research assistant at the Leipzig University, where he worked closely with Peter Debye, Werner Heisenberg, and Hans Kautzky.
[3] Following his research and teaching activities in Leipzig, he became a professor at the Poznań University in occupied Poland (1942).
[3][4] From 1947 to 1951 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen as a department head.
[3] He also proposed the Förster cycle to predict the acid dissociation constant of a photoacid.