Professor Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt held the position of Scientific Director and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich, a member of Helmholtz, the association of national laboratories in Germany, from July 1, 2014 to July 31, 2023. He acted as a vice-president of Helmholtz for the Research Field Information.
Wolfgang Marquardt studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, where he graduated in 1982 with a Master’s degree (Diplom-Ingenieur). In 1988, he graduated with a PhD on nonlinear wave propagation in distillation processes. He completed his Habilitation in 1992 and obtained his teaching license in the area of process dynamics and operations. A stipend of NATO was awarded to Wolfgang for a research visit as a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1989/1990. In 1992, Wolfgang accepted an offer from RWTH Aachen University as a full professor and chair for process systems engineering. He also acted as the Olaf Hougen Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1999, and as a guest professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 2004.
At RWTH Aachen University, Wolfgang took responsibility in several coordinated research programs. He acted as director and a co-director of two long-term Collaborative Research Centers funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Information Technology Support for Collaborative and Distributed Design Processes in Chemical Engineering (IMPROVE) from 1997 to 2009 and Model-Based Experimental Analysis of Multi-Phase Fluid Reaction Systems from 1999 to 2009. He was an initiator and a member of the steering committee of the Center of Excellence Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass, and of the Graduate School Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science funded by the Federal and State Governments as part of the German Excellence Initiative from 2007 to 2018 and 2006 to 2019, respectively. He served as a Director of the Center for Computational Engineering Science at RWTH Aachen University from 2006 to 2011. From 2007 to 2011, he was a member of the Strategy Board of RWTH Aachen University. Wolfgang founded AixCAPE e.V. in 2002 and lead this non-for-profit organization engaging in the transfer of model-based methods and tools to the process industries until 2014. He was a co-founder of the spin-off S-PACT GmbH, developing and marketing software for process analytics and optical spectroscopy.
Wolfgang held a number of positions in the German science system. He was a member of Fakultätentag Maschinenbau und Verfahrenstechnik, the association of all Departments of Chemical and Mechanical Engineering at German Universities. He acted as its Chairman in 2003 and 2004. From 2004 to 2010, Wolfgang was a member of the Senate of DFG. In 2010, Wolfgang was elected to become a member of the German Council for Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), an advisory body to the German Federal and State Governments, and acted as its Chair from 2011 to 2014. Since 2015, he is a member of the Council for Information Infrastructures, which provides advice to the German Federal and State Governments.
Wolfgang Marquardt is a member of various learned societies, the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste (since 1998), of acatech, the German Akademie der Technikwissenschaften (since 2001), of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Science (since 2014), of the US National Academy of Engineering (since 2020), and of the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK (since 2023). He received a number of prestigious awards, including the Arnold Eucken-Preis of VDI-GVC in 1990, the Leibniz-Preis of the German Research Foundation in 2001 and the Nordic Process Control Award in 2016. He was honored to present the Roger Sargent Lecture in 2004 and the Danckwerts Lecture of AIChE in 2008. He became a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control in 2007.