Public | |
Traded as | NASDAQ: BRKR |
Founded | 1960 in Germany |
Founder | Professor Günther Laukien |
Headquarters | Billerica, Massachusetts, USA |
Key people
|
Dr. Frank Laukien, President & CEO; William Knight, COO |
Revenue | US$ 1.62 billion (2015)[1] |
Number of employees
|
6000 |
Website | www |
Bruker Corporation is a manufacturer of scientific instruments for molecular and materials research, as well as for industrial and applied analysis. It is headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts and is the publicly traded parent company of Bruker Scientific Instruments (Bruker AXS, Bruker BioSpin, Bruker Daltonics and Bruker Optics) and Bruker Energy & Supercon Technologies (BEST) divisions.
In April 2010, Bruker created a Chemical Analysis Division (headquartered in Fremont, CA) under the Bruker Daltonics subsidiary. This division contains three former Varian product lines: ICPMS systems, laboratory gas chromatography (GC), and GC-triple quadrupole mass spectrometer (originally designed by Bear Instruments and acquired by Varian in 2001).
In 2012 it sponsored the Fritz Feigl Prize, and since 1999 the company has also sponsored the Günther Laukien Prize.
The company was founded on September 7, 1960, in Karlsruhe, Germany as Bruker-Physik AG by five people, one of them being Günther Laukien, who was a professor at the University of Karlsruhe at the time. The name Bruker originates from co-founder Emil Bruker, as Günther Laukien himself was formally not allowed to commercialize his research whilst being a professor. Bruker produced Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) and EMR spectroscopy equipment then. In the early 1960s, the company had around 60 employees and was growing rapidly. One of the early success products was the HFX 90 NMR spectroscopy system, with three independent channels and which was also the first NRM system using only semiconductor transistors. In 1969, Bruker launched the first commercial Fourier transform NMR spectroscopy system (FT-NMR) and in the 1970s the company was the first to commercialize a superconducting FT-NMR. Later, the company would expand their product range with MRI, FTIR and FT-Raman spectrometers and with mass spectrometers.