New Director Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. David May

After Prof. Dr.-Ing. Axel Herrmann retired on April 1, 2024, Prof. Dr. David May is now the new Director of FIBRE, starting on August 1, 2024.

David May, born in Baden-Baden in 1987, went to Kaiserslautern after his basic military service in the German Air Force.  At the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) he studied industrial engineering and management. He started his scientific career in 2012 at the Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe (IVW), researching on manufacturing science and especially the impregnation behavior of textile reinforcement structures. He obtained his PhD in July 2015 and in January 2016, he became head of the competence field “Impregnation and Preform Technologies”. In parallel he started giving lectures at RPTU, e.g. “Integrated Product Development with Composite Materials”. After being successful in BMBF’s NanoMatFutur competition for young researchers, he also headed an interdisciplinary research group on composite materials for mobility and transportation. In June 2021, he habilitated and received the venia legendi “Process Engineering of Composite Materials”. In 2023, he became Research Director of the newly established Department „Digitalization“ at IVW and since then focused on digitalized material and process development.

In 2024, David May was appointed full professor at University of Bremen, where he now leads the Research Group Materials Engineering/Fiber Composites/Lightweight Design. As head of the Faserinstitut Bremen e.V., he will research the FIBRE topics ranging from fibers to technical textiles and composites. Additionally, as part of his Airbus endowed professorship he will research on rivet-free assembly technologies for fiber composites.