The Leibniz-IWT is pleased to announce that Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Rainer Fechte-Heinen will succeed Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Werner Zoch as Managing Director of Leibniz-IWT on 1 June 2020.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Rainer Fechte-Heinen also takes over the office of Managing Director of the Department of Materials Engineering as well as the management of the Official Materials Testing Institute of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen and the management of the Department 11 Materials Engineering / Metals in the Department 4 Production Engineering of the University of Bremen. Since 2004, Prof. Zoch, in his many years of work as Managing Director, has decisively influenced and developed the Institute in many areas. This year he will retire.

His successor, Prof. Dr. Fechte-Heinen, completed his studies of mechanical engineering from 2000 to 2004 with the main focus on materials simulation and mechanics in Bochum, Seville and Berkeley. In 2007, he completed his doctorate at the Ruhr University of Bochum on the subject of simulating martensitic phase transformations in shape memory alloys. He then worked part-time on his habilitation, has been giving his own lectures continuously since 2009, and was appointed as a Privatdozent at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2014 and honorary professor of materials mechanics of phase transformations in solids in 2018.

From 2007 to 2020 Prof. Dr. Fechte-Heinen held various positions at thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG in the materials competency center and in research and development. He was responsible among other things for optimization projects for existing steels and their production systems, the development of innovative functional materials, idea generation and validation, and IP management. Before joining Leibniz-IWT, he was head of product development with a focus on hardened, tempered and multiphase hot-rolled steel products.