Dennis M. Kochmann joins D-MAVT

Dennis M. Kochmann, currently Professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), will join the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering (D-MAVT) as Professor of Mechanics and Materials in April 2017.

by Inken De Wit

Dennis Kochmann’s research aims at modelling and controlling the mechanics and physics of solids. Using analytical, numerical and experimental techniques, he investigates why solids and structures behave the way they do and, in particular, how such material performance can be controlled at the microstructural level, for example, by means of models that bridge across scales from atomistics to the macroscopically observable level. His work has won several awards, among them the NSF CAREER Award, IUTAM’s Bureau Prize in Solid Mechanics and GAMM’s Richard von Mises Prize.

He graduated from Ruhr-University Bochum with a Diploma (Dipl.-Ing.) in Mechanical Engineering/Applied Mechanics and spent one year as a Fulbright fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received a Master's degree in Engineering Mechanics in June 2006. Back at Ruhr-University Bochum, he received his Doctor of Engineering (Dr.-Ing.) in Mechanical Engineering in June 2009. Kochmann then returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Engineering Physics, before joining the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in September 2010 as a postdoctoral scholar in Aerospace and as a Feodor Lynen fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Since September 2011 he has been a faculty member in Caltech’s Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT) in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science and became Professor of Aerospace in November 2016. He is the Vice-Chair of the Technical Thrust Area on Nanotechnology and Lower-Scale Phenomena at the United States Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM).

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