Wolfgang Marquardt
On 1 July 2014, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt took over as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Vice-President of the Helmholtz Association, and Coordinator of the Research Field Key Technologies.
Wolfgang Marquardt studied process engineering at the University of Stuttgart. He completed his PhD there in 1988 on non-linear waves in distillation processes, before receiving his habilitation in 1992 in the field of process dynamics and process operations and control.
In 1992, Wolfgang Marquardt was appointed to the newly established Chair of Process Systems Engineering – a position from which he was seconded upon joining Forschungszentrum Jülich. His research interests are model-based process engineering and process systems engineering with an emphasis on modelling, analysis, process synthesis and control, as well as numerical and computational methods and tools supporting process-engineering development processes. On the applications side, he focuses on areas such as the processing of renewable raw materials, polymerization, seawater desalination, wastewater treatment, synthetic biofuels, real-time optimization and control of process engineering systems, the calibration of high-resolution measuring techniques, and the design of hybrid separation processes and reactor systems. He lectured as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (USA) in 1999 and at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) in 2004.
During his time as professor at RWTH Aachen University, Wolfgang Marquardt was spokesman and co-spokesman of two collaborative research centres and spokesman of Aachen Chemical Engineering (AVT). He was a member of the management committees of the excellence cluster Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass and of the Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science. From 2006 to 2011, he was director of the Center for Computational Engineering Science at RWTH Aachen University.
In 2010, he became a member of the Scientific Commission of the German Council of Science and Humanities, and in 2011, he took over as Chairman of the German Council of Science and Humanities – an office he held until taking up his position at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
In 2002, Wolfgang Marquardt co-founded AixCAPE e.V. in Aachen, a technology transfer platform in the field of computer-aided process engineering and was Chairman of the Board until 2014. In 2010, he co-founded the spin-off S-PACT GmbH, a company specializing in process analytics and spectroscopy.
Wolfgang Marquardt has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 1998. He was elected member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering in 2002 and member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, in 2014. He has received a range of awards and prizes for his research work, including the Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation in 2001. In 1990, he was awarded the Arnold Eucken Prize by the Association of German Engineers – Society for Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (VDI-GVC) and in 2016 he received the Nordic Process Control Award. In 2007, he was elected Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).
Wolfgang Marquardt boasts more than 350 ISI-listed publications, over 25 book contributions, and in excess of 200 refereed conference publications. (h-index: 41 (ISI, November 2017), h-index: 56 (Google Scholar, November 2017), h-index since 2012: 34 (Google Scholar, November 2017))