Professor Jochen M. Schneider Appointed Max Planck Fellow

Prof. Jochen M. Schneider, Chair of Materials Chemistry, RWTH Aachen University and Member of JARA-ENERGY, has been appointed Fellow of the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung (MPIE) in Düsseldorf, Germany. Starting from October 2015, he will lead a research group developing self-reporting materials.

Weakening and degradation of engineering materials are rarely visible from the outside and may result in costly failure of components during application. By combining theoretical as well as experimental methods, Schneider’s group at MPIE will design so-called self-reporting materials, reporting a change in performance during application through property changes. This property alteration is based on changes in chemical composition at the atomic level and/or structure and will be detected during application, enabling damage assessment.

Initially, materials with periodic charge density distributions are in the research focus. Based on these investigations and quantum mechanical calculations, self-reporting materials will be developed by substituting and adding elements to the material in question. The realization of this concept will enable Industry 4.0 on an atomic scale.

Jochen M. Schneider, born in 1969, studied materials engineering in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USA and received his Ph.D. in 1998.

Subsequently, he worked as a post-doc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, USA, and as an assistant professor and docent at Linköping University, Sweden.

In 2002, he was appointed Professor and Chair of Materials Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University. His research focus is quantum-mechanically guided materials design. He was awarded the Sofja Kovalevskaya Prize for outstanding materials research by the president of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation in 2001. He was appointed Fellow of the American Vacuum Society (AVS) in 2013.

The Max Planck Society awards the Max Planck Fellowship to outstanding university professors, offering the opportunity to establish and lead a Max Planck research group, initially for 5 years. By awarding the Fellowship the Max Planck Society strengthens the scientific cooperation with RWTH Aachen University.