Plenary Speakers

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Swantje Bargmann (BU Wuppertal)

Swantje Bargmann is a full professor at University of Wuppertal in Germany; after having hold a full professor position at TU Hamburg (jointly with Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Geesthacht), an assistant professor position at TU Dortmund as well as guest professor positions at Chalmers University (Sweden) and University of Cape Town (South Africa). Her research work focuses on material modeling of solids and has received several awards, e.g., Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (DFG), Richard von Mises Prize (GAMM), Science Prize (Industrieclub Düsseldorf), Scientific Prize (Esaform) as well as scholarships from, e.g., Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Korean Research Foundation and Heinrich-Hertz-Foundation.

 

Prof. Dr. Laura de Lorenzis (ETH Zurich)

Laura De Lorenzis received her PhD from the University of Lecce, where she was promoted to Assistant and later Associate Professor of Solid and Structural mechanics. In 2013 she moved to the TU Braunschweig, Germany, as Professor and Director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics. Since February 2020 she is full Professor of Computational Mechanics at ETH Zurich. She has been awarded with a number of prizes, including the RILEM L’Hermite Medal 2011, the AIMETA Junior Prize 2011, the IIFC Young Investigator Award 2012, an ERC Starting Grant and is elected Euromech Solid Mechanics Fellow 2022. Her research interests lie in the area of computational and applied mechanics.

 

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marc-André Keip (U Stuttgart)

Marc-André Keip studied Civil Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) and graduated in 2004. After two years in industry he started doctoral studies in solid mechanics at the group of Jörg  Schröder (UDE), from which he graduated in 2011. Following a short phase  as PostDoc at the same group and a research stay with Kaushik  Bhattacharya at Caltech, he became Junior-Professor within the Cluster  of Excellence in Simulation Technology at the University of Stuttgart at the group of Christian Miehe. From 2016 to 2019, he was Substitute Professor of Applied Mechanics. Since then, Marc-André Keip is a Full  Professor of Applied Mechanics (Materials Theory) at the University of  Stuttgart.

 

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Otto von Estorff (TU Hamburg)

After studying civil engineering at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and completing his PhD in the field of mechanics (1986), Otto von Estorff spent one year as a visiting scientist at MIT, Cambridge, USA. From there, he changed to the consulting company IABG in Ottobrunn (near Munich), where he worked for seven years as a project manager and later on as the department head. In 1997, Otto von Estorff accepted a call of the Hamburg University of Technology, where he heads the Institute of Modelling and Computation until today. In order to put his research focus in the fields of acoustics and vibrations into practice, he founded (in 2003, together with two colleagues) an own consulting company which is meanwhile well-established as a reliable partner for industrial projects in the mentioned areas. Otto von Estorff is author/co-author of more than 450 scientific publications, reviewer of various funding organizations as well as journals, and a member of several scientific societies.

 

Dr.-Ing. Karl Steeger (CPI Vertex Antennentechnik GmbH)

Dr. Karl Steeger is currently active in the position of Director of  Engineering at CPI Vertex Antennentechnik GmbH in Duisburg, Germany. After accomplishing his studies in Civil Engineering (B.Sc., 2008) and Computational Mechanics (M.Sc., 2010) he finished his PhD in the field  of least-squares mixed finite elements in 2017. His special engineering expertise is the development and structural (mechanical) design of standard and high performance antennas. Besides that, as a project manager, he is responsible for a variety of  antenna (-related) projects.

 

GACM Best PhD Award Winners

Dr.-Ing. Tobias Kaiser (TU Dortmund/TU Eindhoven)

Tobias Kaiser studied Mechanical Engineering with emphasis on Continuum Mechanics and Simulation Technologies at TU Dortmund University, where he received his M.Sc. degree in 2015. Focusing on the modelling of non-simple and anisotropic continua, he continued his studies as a Ph.D. student in the group of Prof. Andreas Menzel and obtained his doctoral degree in 2019. During his studies, he had the opportunity to spend some time as a visiting researcher with Prof. Panayiotis Papadopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley and with Prof. Samuel Forest at Mines ParisTech.

Today, Tobias Kaiser’s research focuses on computational multiscale methods and microscale mechanics. In particular, he develops efficient multiscale simulation techniques as a member of Prof. Marc Geer’s group at Eindhoven University of Technology, and studies multiscale modelling approaches for electrical conductors as a principal investigator in the CRC/Transregio 188 and as member of Prof. Andreas Menzel’s group at TU Dortmund University.

Dr.-Ing. Bettina Römer (U Kassel)

Bettina Römer, née Schröder, was born in 1988 in  Ingolstadt, where she obtained her higher education entrance  qualification after having lived some years in Hungary and Mexico. In  2007 she began her studies in Mechanical Engineering at the Technical  University Braunschweig. In the following year she got the possibility  to be part of the integrated degree program established between the  University of Kassel and the Volkswagen AG. In 2011 she finished her  apprenticeship as industrial mechanic. One year  later she obtained her Diploma I and Diploma II in Mechanical  Engineering and received the "Mechanical Engineering Award“ as best  graduate in both degrees. Afterwards, she started as a research  assistant at the Institute of Mechanics and Dynamics at the University  of Kassel supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Detlef Kuhl. Since 2016 she is a  technical specialist for simulation at the development department at  Volkswagen in Kassel. With her dissertation "Consistent Higher Order  Accurate Time Discretization Methods for Inelastic  Material Models“ she obtained her doctorate in 2019 at the Faculty of  Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Kassel. 

 

Dr.-Ing. Maximilian Grill (TU München)

Maximilian Grill holds a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering  as well as a Bachelor's degree in Management and Technology from the  Technical University of Munich (TUM). He pursued his PhD studies in the  field of computational biophysics at the Institute for Computational  Mechanics (Prof. Wolfgang A. Wall) at TUM and graduated in 2020. During  his study abroad and his research stays, he spent some time at the  Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and the University of  California in Los Angeles. Dr. Grill's dissertation entitled  "Computational Models and Methods for Molecular Interactions of  Deformable Fibers in Complex Biophysical Systems" was awarded the "Best  PhD Award 2020" by GACM and the "Department Prize - Dissertation 2021"  by the Department for Mechanical Engineering at TUM.

 

Dr.-Ing. Tobias Bode (Leibniz University Hannover)

Tobias Bode studied Mechanical Engineering at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), where he received his M.Sc. degree in 2017. During  his master studies, he spent some time at the lab of Prof. Tarek I. Zohdi at the University of California in Berkeley. Focusing on the development of meshfree discretization schemes, he continued his studies as a Ph.D. student in the group of Prof. Peter Wriggers at the Institute of Continuum Mechanics (ICM) and obtained his doctoral degree in 2021. Dr. Bode's dissertation entitled "Peridynamic Galerkin methods for nonlinear solid mechanics" will be awarded the "Best PhD Award 2021" by GACM. Currently, he is a member of Prof. Philipp Junker's group in the cluster of excellence PhoenixD in Garbsen.