Draft:Olaf Deutschmann

Olaf Deutschmann is a German physicist and Professor for Chemical Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology(KIT), Germany. He serves as director at the Institute for Chemical Technology and Polymer Chemistry and the Institute of Catalysis Research and Technology at KIT.

Life and Academic Background
Olaf Deutschmann studied physics at the Technical University of Magdeburg earning a Master's degree in Physics with a thesis in the field of chaos theory in 1991. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 1996, in Heidelberg University, under the supervision of Jürgen Warnatz. He did his post-doctoral research with Lanny D. Schmidt at the University of Minnesota and worked as a Consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (1997-1998). After moving back to Heidelberg, he obtained the venia legendi (habilitation) in Physical Chemistry at Heidelberg University in 2001. After joining the faculty at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2003, he further expanded his research into electrochemical applications such as solid-oxide fuel cells, focusing on-anode hydrocarbon fuel-reformation catalysis and automotive catalytic exhaust-gas after-treatment. In 2006, he became Full Professor, holding today the Chair in Chemical Technology at KIT and has been an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Chemical Engineering at KIT since 2016 and is the Coordinator at KIT of the DFG Collaborative Research Centres SFB/TRR 150. Since 2020, he has been the Co-Spokesperson of the Consortium NFDI for Catalysis-Related Sciences (NFDI4Cat)

Awards and professional activities
In 2018, he was recognised as a Fellow of The Combustion Institute in Pittsburgh, USA, for his pioneering research in heterogeneous catalysis supporting combustion and energy-conversion technologies. He received the DECHEMA Award of the Max Buchner Research Foundation in 2004.

Deutschmann is Founding Director of the Emission Control Center Karlsruhe, Director of the Steinbeis Transfer Center Reactive Flows, an enterprise of the Steinbeis GmbH & Co. KG für Technologietransfer, Stuttgart, Germany.

He has served on Editorial and Advisory Boards of scientific journals such as “Progress in Energy and Combustion Science”, “Applications in Energy and Combustion Science” , "Journal of Emission Control Science and Technology" and "The Proceedings of The Combustion Institute". He is an organiser of the bi-annual MODEGAT conference series.

Software Development
Deutschmann develops experimental tools for a better understanding of chemical reactors, coupled with mathematical modeling and numerical simulation. Under his guidance, the software packages DETCHEMTM, CaRMeN, and Adacta have been developed.

Research
The Deutschmann group works on the development of climate and environmentally friendly chemical technologies. These research activities include carbon-free chemical energy carriers, emission control, fuel and electrolysis cells, reaction engineering, heterogeneous catalysis, material synthesis, and multiphase flows. The methods used range from laser spectroscopy and kinetic measurements over digitalization and software development to numerical simulation and optimization of technical reactors. The development of detailed multi-step surface chemistry, and its incorporation into computational reacting-flow simulation, is a unifying theme in over 30 years research of Deutschmann.

Deutschmann makes his extensive library of validated reaction mechanisms freely available online.