Prof Dr Martin Holthaus, lecturer at the Institute of Physics at CvO University Oldenburg, was awarded the title of Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society (APS) in March. The ASP is the publisher of leading international physics journals such as "Physical Review Letters" and "Physical Review". The editors are dependent on the reliable and conscientious work of anonymous referees to guarantee a consistently high scientific standard. The often painstaking work of the referees is very time-consuming and has hardly been recognised to date. For this reason, this year the APS has for the first time honoured 534 of the currently 42,000 active referees of the above-mentioned journals as "Outstanding Referees". The main criteria for the selection were the quality, number and timeliness of the reviews in recent years. The Director of the Institute of Physics, Prof. Dr Andreas Engel, spoke of the great honour bestowed on his colleague, Martin Holthaus, with this award. Martin Holthaus studied in Münster and Bonn and then completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in Bonn. After a two-year research stay at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he became a research assistant in Marburg, where he habilitated in 1996. After a further research stay at the LMU Munich as a Heisenberg scholarship holder of the German Research Foundation, he has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at the CvO University of Oldenburg since 2000.