Gerhard Materlik has made important discoveries in the science and application of Synchroton Radiation and is the leader of the team that constructed and now operates the world leading Diamond Light Source facility. He has contributed to the many fields in the application of synchrotron x-rays (SXR) most of which are now widely used experimental methods with SXR. He has made notable contributions to the improvement of SXR sources, notably the soft X-ray FEL, FLASH at DESY, the newly commissioned hard X-ray FEL, LCLS at SLAC and the hard X-ray FEL, E-XFEL, currently been built at DESY.