Reinhold Dorn was born in Munich and studied physics at universities in Munich, Nottingham and Heidelberg. He received his Ph.D (Dr. rer. nat. with magna cum laude) in 2001 from the University of Heidelberg with a thesis dissertation on a special detector development for curvature wavefront sensing for adaptive optics.

Since 1998 he has been working for the European Southern Observatory and holds the position of a international staff member within the Instrumentation Division.

Reinhold Dorn has more than 20 years experience in instrumentation, specially on detector research and development of state of the art detector systems for the Very Large Telescope. His main research interests include optical and IR detectors in the wavelength range of 300 nm up to 28 microns as well as high speed wavefront sensors and ASICs for astronomical application.

In 2011 he moved from the Detector Systems Department to the Instrument Systems Department working as a instrumentation physicist for various projects.