Prof. Dr. Peter Gumbsch

Insti­tute of Applied Materi­als, Karlsruhe Insti­tute of Technol­ogy & Fraun­hofer Insti­tute for Mechan­ics of Materi­als IWM

Peter Gumbsch holds the chair for Mechan­ics of Materi­als at the Karlsruhe Insti­tute of Technol­ogy (KIT) and is Head of the Fraun­hofer Insti­tute for Mechan­ics of Materi­als in Freiburg.

His research activ­i­ties focus on model­ing and simula­tion of materi­als, in partic­u­lar multi­scale model­ling approaches. His activ­i­ties cover atomistic simula­tion, mesoscopic model­ing as well as macro­scopic materi­als descrip­tions. Central research topics are defor­ma­tion and fracture processes as well as inter­face proper­ties in metals and ceram­ics. He has recently started new activ­i­ties in the area of tribology.

Peter Gumbsch has received numer­ous awards and honors includ­ing the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Research Founda­tion (DFG) in 2007. He is member of the German Council of Science and Human­i­ties, of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopold­ina), of the German Academy of Engineer­ing Sciences (acatech) and the US National Academy of Engineer­ing (NAE). Since 2017, he has been chair­man of the Scien­tific Commis­sion of the German Council of Science and Human­i­ties. He has been a member of the Presi­den­tial Board of the Fraun­hofer-Gesellschaft since 2019.