Speakers

Erich Wimmer is co-founder, Chief Scientific Officer and Chairman of the Board of Materials Design, a company developing software and providing services for materials research. He received an engineering degree in 1974 from the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, and a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1977 from the same institution. As research associate with Prof. A. J. Freeman at Northwestern University, Illinois, USA, Dr. Wimmer was instrumental in the development of the highly accurate FLAPW method for calculating structural and electronic properties of solids and surfaces. After his “Habilitation” at the University of Vienna, he moved in 1985 to the US joining Cray Research in Minnesota as Technical Director, where he initiated and headed an industrial consortium to develop a new generation of software for materials modeling ("UniChem"). In 1992 he was hired by Biosym Technologies in San Diego to start an industrial consortium in electronic, optical, and magnetic materials. In 1999 he became a co-founder of the company Materials Design, where he is leading a contract research team working on a wide range of industrial materials problems such as hydrogen pickup in structural materials of nuclear reactors, interface issues of electronic materials, diffusion in polymers, and optimization of chemical processes such as CO2 capture. Dr. Wimmer is author and co-author of over 130 scientific publications and book contributions. He has given numerous invited talks worldwide. Dr. Wimmer has been selected as “Outstanding Referee” by the American Physical Society. He is also member of the Materials Research Society, the American Chemical Society, and the American Nuclear Society and he serves as chairman of the industrial advisory board of MARVEL.