Advisory Board 2024

After the Masters study of technical physics at Graz University of Technology Christiane Mair started working as a researcher at the VIRTUAL VEHICLE in Austria on battery safety. Her focus is set on vent gas analysis and early battery failure detection. Christiane finished her PhD thesis 2021. The aim of her PhD work was to improve battery safety by gaining insight in the failing behavior of Li-ion cells and examining concepts for early battery failure detection. Since 2022 Christiane leads the battery safety team at VIRTUAL VEHICLE.

After studying mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen Mark Gevers joined TECOSIM as a CAE Engineer in 2001. From 2008 to 2019 he has been General Manager of TECOSIMs branch office in Cologne. Since 2019 he is in charge of TECOSIM's e-mobility and benchmarking activities as Director Business Development. For four years he has been assistant professor for material simulations.

Stefan Hiermaier studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of German Armed Forces in Munich and obtained his doctorate from the Faculty of Civil Engineering. His habilitation on high-speed dynamics of materials dates from 2002. Stefan Hiermaier was appointed the first Professor in the field of high-speed dynamics in Germany in 2008. 2015 Hiermaier was appointed Professor for Sustainable Systems Engineering at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. He is both Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics and Director of the Department of Sustainable Systems Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. He is also vice-dean of the faculty and co-coordinator of the Sustainability Center Freiburg, a co-operation of the five Fraunhofer Institutes in Freiburg and the Albert-Ludwigs-University. Stefan Hiermaier’s major research interest is Resilient Dynamics, i.e. resilience of complex critical infrastructure. One focus is the dynamic behavior and shock wave physics of materials and structures integrating experimental and numerical methods. Major issues are discretization methods and constitutive equations for materials under crash and impact loads. Design of Critical Infrastructure towards more resilience with respect to disruptive events and related uncertainties is the research Stefan Hiermaier persues entitled as Resilience Engineering. Stefan Hiermaier has written numerous publications on these topics. His book “Structures Under Crash and Impact” was published by Springer in 2008. Stefan Hiermaier has been president of the DYMAT association (European association for the promotion of research into the dynamic behaviour of materials and its applications) since 2012.

Rainer Hoffmann has been involved in automotive safety throughout his career. After graduating from Wayne State University, he joined Porsche as a research associate in passive safety. Mr. Hoffmann advanced safety simulation during his subsequent tenure at ESI Group where he introduced new techniques like airbag simulation, numerical airbag folding and FE dummy modeling. As the head of the simulation department of PARS (now Continental Safety Engineering), Mr. Hoffmann led the R&D efforts for some of the first series production side airbag developments. In 1994 Mr. Hoffmann founded EASi Engineering GmbH, which in 2006 was renamed to carhs GmbH. He has authored numerous technical papers and has been granted German and international patents in the automotive safety field.

Rainer Justen has more than 30 years of experience in the field of vehicle safety. After his studies in mechanical engineering with a focus on automotive engineering he started his career in the automotive development at Daimler AG in 1987. Several career milestones in the fields of vehicle safety, project management, safety concepts and active safety / driver assistance systems made him an expert on all relevant topics of automotive safety. Since 2008 he is working in the field of safety for alternative drive systems. Rainer Justen is author of numerous publications and papers on this topic. In 2015 Rainer Justen received the SAE Automotive Safety Award for his work on the Safety of Li-ion Batteries in Electric Vehicles from the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).

ZHOU Qing is a professor at the School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University. Prof. Zhou serves as the Director of Vehicle Safety Committee of the Chinese Society of Automotive Engineers, Associate Editor of International Journal of Impact Engineering, and Council Member of International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury (IRCOBI). Qing Zhou received his BS degree from Peking University and PhD degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. During the period from 1994 to 2003, Dr. Zhou worked at the General Motors R&D Center and the Volpe Center of the US Department of Transportation, respectively. His research interests include vehicle safety, human body impact protection, material and structural failures under impact loads, and crash safety of battery and electric vehicle.