David May, born in Baden-Baden in 1987, moved to Kaiserslautern after completing his basic military service in the German Air Force to study industrial engineering with a specialization in mechanical engineering at the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU). In 2012, he began working as a research assistant at the Leibniz Institute for Composite Materials (IVW), where he earned his Ph.D. in July 2015 in the field of processing technology with a dissertation on the impregnation behavior of textile reinforcement structures. In January 2016, he became head of the “Impregnation and Preform Technologies” research area and a lecturer at the RPTU for “Integrated Product Development with Composite Materials.” After winning the BMBF’s NanoMatFutur competition for early-career researchers, he also led an interdisciplinary research group on composite materials for mobility and transportation. In June 2021, he completed his habilitation and received the venia legendi in “Process Engineering of Composite Materials.” In 2023, he became the Technical and Scientific Director of the newly established Department of Digitalization at the IVW and focused his efforts on digitized materials and process development.

In 2024, May accepted a position at the University of Bremen. There, he represents the field of Materials Engineering/Fiber-Reinforced Composites/Lightweight Construction in the Department of Production Engineering, where he currently also serves as associate dean. As director of the Faserinstitut Bremen e.V., he conducts research on fibers for technical textiles and fiber-reinforced plastic composites. As part of an Airbus Endowed Professorship, his research focuses on rivetless assembly technologies (primarily welding technologies) for fiber-plastic composites.