Philipp Bielefeldt

Sailing

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:26:42 +0200

I love being outdoors, and most of all on the water!

To me, sailing is a great, a truly technical sport. Racing means reading the wind on the water, fiddling with the trim, thinking about sail profiles and flow, and making tactical decisions in seconds — a regatta field is one big, wet physics lab. (Oh, and whoever sails with me gets all of this explained, whether they like it or not.) It’s simply exciting to feel the interplay between physics and sport all the time.

THW

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:26:10 +0200

I am a trained squad leader with the Technisches Hilfswerk (THW, the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief), in the specialist unit for lighting, emergency repair and emergency supply. We are mainly responsible for power and light: We supply operation sites with electricity, light up helicopter landing sites and bring light to places that are left in the dark.

For twelve years, from 2009 to 2021, I was a volunteer, specialist instructor and squad leader. Besides operations, I led training courses on electricity, light and everything that goes with it — at the THW, too, physics is best explained hands-on. Teaching is my passion not only at the museum.

Software & DevOps

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:25:20 +0200

Since 2022, I have been a software developer at 4Soft GmbH in Munich.

The heart of my work is a large, demanding C++/Qt application for engineers that manages measurement and simulation data and helps optimise components — and that our customers in aerospace work with every day. I develop and maintain it — among other things, we migrated it from Qt4/C++11 to Qt6 and C++20. This ties in with my simulation and analysis work at university, just from the tooling side: Now I build the tool instead of using it. Currently, I’m helping to migrate the application to the web — a modern collaboration solution based on TypeScript and Angular.

Physics & Simulations

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:20:42 +0200

For a long time, particle physics was the core of my working life. For my PhD at the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics (University of Bonn), I studied a time projection chamber (TPC) for the CBELSA/TAPS experiment — that is, how to reconstruct particle momenta as precisely as possible from the tracks of ionising radiation.

Track reconstruction: developing and improving algorithms in several analysis frameworks
Simulation and analysis with Geant4 and ROOT — scientific data simulation and analysis, comparing measured data with Monte Carlo studies (in C++, Python and Julia)
Statistical evaluation of the results

My master’s thesis examined the stray field of a magnetic spectrometer and its effect on momentum reconstruction — including building a magnetic field shielding. In my bachelor’s thesis, I characterised a novel gas amplification stage — similar to a GEM foil — for highly granular readout with MiniPix pixel detectors.