Rainer Blatt has received the Stern-Gerlach Medal of the German Physical Society for his work in the fields of metrology and quantum information processing with electromagnetically stored ions. He is the first Austrian scientist to receive the award, which is the highest honor of the society in the field of experimental physics. Through experiments, Blatt showed that trapped ions offer a unique experimental platform to encode, process and measure quantum bits, a necessity for future quantum computers. Blatt is a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck.