Supervisory Board

Prof. Dr. Gerd Litfin (Chairman)

Professor Dr Gerd Litfin was born in 1948 and is the founder of the LINOS Group and was the Chief Executive Officer of LINOS AG until end of December 2006. Since January 2007, he is the chairman of the supervisory board.

After graduating in physics, Professor Litfin first worked as a member of the research staff at the Institute for Quantum Optics at Hanover Technical University for several years, where he also completed his doctorate.
After qualifying as a lecturer in physics, he was appointed to the executive board of Spindler & Hoyer GmbH & Co., where he was responsible for development and systems engineering. Professor Litfin laid the foundations for the LINOS Group by means of a management buyout in 1996 and the subsequent takeover of the companies Steeg & Reuter, Franke-Optik and Gsänger Optoelektronik.

In addition to an associate professorship at Hanover University, Professor Dr Litfin holds senior positions in various scientific and research bodies, including advisory board chairman of the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and member of the advisory board of the Laserzentrum Hannover e.V. As the spokesman for the programme committee of the “German Agenda – Optical Technologies for the 21st Century“, Professor Dr Litfin is considered to be one of the opinion-leaders in the photonics industry.

Professor Dr Litfin’s commitment to higher education and the training of talented young engineers is reflected by the physics, metrology and precision mechanics department (now known as the faculty of natural sciences and technology) that he initiated at Göttingen University of Applied Sciences. With Professor Dr Litfin, LINOS AG is headed by a man of exceptional skills in the photonics field who is respected outside his industry as well.

Nils Stoesser

Nils Stoesser holds joint British/German nationality, was educated at Newcastle University and has a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering.

He joined Candover in 1999 from Arthur Andersen where he spent a year in the transaction support department after qualifying as a chartered accountant.  Nils was responsible for the buyouts of Aspen Insurance and Wellstream, and most recently worked on the buyout of Vetco International, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvD) and Qioptiq.

Dipl. Kfm. Gerd Kastrup

Gerd Kastrup has had many years of experience with medium-sized companies operating in numerous different industries. Until he retired at the beginning of 2006, he had for more than 30 years been director of NORD Holding Unternehmensbeteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Hanover - an investment company of the public banking and insurance industry in Northern Germany. Gerd Kastrup has been involved with LINOS and the company that preceded it since as long ago as 1986. He became the first Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the company when it changed its legal form and went public in 2000.