Interview

Melissa Telong

Melissa Telong is an engineer specializing in construction chemistry and physics. She has been researching sustainable building materials at BAM since 2019. Together with colleagues from the LeBeDigital team, she is working on the development of an ontology for the concrete production process chain.

Marian Bruns

Marian Bruns is a postdoctoral researcher at Max-Planck-Institute for Sustainable Materials GmbH (former „Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH“) and works in the PMD focus-area „IT-Architecture and Infrastructure“. He obtained the degree M. Sc. in physics at TU Dortmund and continued with his PhD-studies at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Materials Simulation (ICAMS), Ruhr-Universität Bochum. There, he worked on computer simulations of thermo-mechanical treatments of bulk metallic glasses and obtained a broad knowledge in both the domains of materials science and information technology.

Jörg Schaarschmidt

Jörg Schaarschmidt works in the research department for Multiscale Material Modeling and Virtual Design at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and has been actively shaping the MaterialDigital platform for 4 years. Together with Tilmann Hickel, he leads the workflow team and is part of the architecture team. After his PhD in Life Sciences at the University of Leipzig, he worked as a postdoc at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Ursula Pähler

Ursula Pähler is a research assistant at the Deggendorf Institute of Technology (THD) at the Technology Campus Freyung (TCF) - Institute for Applied Computer Science & Bionics. Her Master's degree in Technology Management followed her Bachelor's degrees in Engineering Physics and Industrial Engineering. After several positions at the THD (including STEM promotion), she is now responsible for ontologies in the SensoTwin project at the TCF. At the same time, she advises companies on topics relating to digitalisation and AI in the Zukunftszentrum Süd project.

Ebrahim Norouzi

Ebrahim Norouzi is a Junior Researcher at FIZ Karlsruhe with Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Materials Science and Simulation from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Materials Simulation (ICAMS) at the Ruhr University Bochum. After completing his master’s degree, he worked as a scientific researcher at the Materials Informatics group of Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM). Ebrahim Norouzi acquired a deep understanding of material characterization techniques from his previous work at the Max Planck Institute for Iron research.

Heike Wittek

Heike Wittek studied mechanical engineering at the Leibniz University of Hannover where she obtained her doctorate. She is deputy head of the department Processing Methodology at Deutsches Institut für Kautschuktechnologie e.V. (https://www.dikautschuk.de/) and has been helping to advance the digitalisation of rubber processing as part of the project DIGITRUBBER since 2021.

Miriam Eisenbart

Miriam Eisenbart studied mechanical engineering at KIT before joining the fem Research Institute for Precious Metals and Metal Chemistry in Schwäbisch Gmünd as a research assistant. For the past 2.5 years, she has been coordinating the platform MaterialDigital project KupferDigital. Since May, she has been head of the newly founded department "Digitalisation and AI" at the fem.

Lisa Beran

Lisa Beran is a bilingual theoretical physicist with a PhD from the Philipps University in Marburg. She is currently working as a researcher at the INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken in the program division "Structure Formation". Within the MaterialDigital initiative, Lisa Beran has been working in the DigiBatMat project since June 2022 and will continue her work in the follow-up project DaMaStE.

Alexander Straumal

Since January 2023, Dr. Alexander Straumal manages the MaterialDigital platform office and coordinates the platform's development. Previously, he worked in materials science research and studied grain boundaries and grain boundary effects in polycrystalline metals.

Birgit Skrotzki

The scientist Birgit Skrotzki heads the Division Metallic High Temperature Materials at BAM and is a member of the steering committee in the project Platform MaterialDigital. Birgit Skrotzki is also currently President of the German Society for Materials Science (DGM).