Volker Springel

{{Short description|German astrophysicist}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2025}}

Volker Springel is a German astrophysicist. He is Director of Computational Astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching.{{cite web |title=Volker Springel |url=https://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/person/55019/2377 |website=Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics |access-date=17 May 2025}}

Springel earned a degree in Physics from the University of Tübingen in 1996 and completed his PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1999. He is known in particular for his contributions to large-scale cosmological simulations; his 2005 paper on the Millennium Simulation has been cited more than 3,000 times and is the most cited astronomy paper ever published in Nature. In 2020, he shared the Gruber Prize in Cosmology with Lars Hernquist for their efforts to improve computational simulations.{{cite web |title=2020 Gruber Cosmology Prize |url=https://gruber.yale.edu/prize/2020-gruber-cosmology-prize |website=Gruber Foundation |access-date=17 May 2025}} He won the Leibniz Prize the following year.{{cite web |title=ORIGINS Scientist Volker Springel honored with the 2021 Leibniz Prize |url=https://www.origins-cluster.de/en/news-events/news/detail/origins-scientist-volker-springel-honored-with-the-2021-leibniz-prize |website=ORIGINS Excellence Cluster |access-date=17 May 2025 |date=12 November 2020}}