Herrmann Hans Jürgen

Biography

Hans Jürgen Herrmann is theoretical physicist and Full Professor at the Institute of Building Materials since April 2006. Born on January 1st, 1954 in La Habana, Cuba, and raised in Bogotá, he studied physics in Göttingen and Cologne where he made his PhD in 1981. After spending one year as post-doc in the USA he became collaborator at the Service de Physique Théorique in Saclay. He became member of section 02 of the CNRS and is today Directeur de Recherche 1ère Cl. en mise à disponibilité. In 1990 he was head of the many-body group at HLRZ of KFA Jülich for four years. Then he was director of the PMMH of ESPCI, Paris for six years, where he also filled a chair. In 1996, he was named full professor and director of the Institute of Computer Physics at the University of Stuttgart. He is a Guggenheim Fellow (1986), member of the Brazilian Academy of Science, Max-Planck prize recipient (2002) and won the 2005 Gentner-Kastler prize. He is managing editor of International Journal of Modern Physics C and of Granular Matter and member of several editorial boards and committees including the Forschungskommission of ETH. He has co-authored about 400 publications and co-edited 13 books.

Research Interest

His education is based on theoretical solid state physics (master) and statistical physics of critical phenomena (PhD). After his PhD he worked among others on gelation and irreversible growth and built a special purpose computer to calculate the conductivity of percolation clusters. He has studied the fracture of heterogeneous materials since 1986 and since 1992, he has investigated the properties of granular media. Highlights in this research were the construction of space-filling bearings and the establishment of the equations of motion of dunes. His present research subjects include dense colloids, the formation of river deltas, quicksand, the failure of fibrous and polymeric composites and complex networks