Thomas Hochrainer

Professor Hochrainer studied industrial mathematics (Technomathematik) at KIT in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he specialized in differential geometry, functional analysis, stochastics and numerics of partial differential equations. His PhD thesis led him into theoretical materials science with the modelling of dislocation based crystal plasticity; a topic which haunts him ever since. After his PhD, Mr. Hochrainer went to the Fraunhofer IWM in Freiburg, Germany, where he worked on damage mechanics and mechanical texture evolution in metals. Afterwards Mr. Hochrainer spent one and a half year at the Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL, USA, where he was concerned with models for point defect diffusion and void growth in nuclear fuels. Back in Germany, Mr. Hochrainer became Juniorprofessor for Werkstoffmechanik/Computational Materials Modeling at the University of Bremen in March 2012. In Bremen he took up his work on dislocation modeling and, for example, raised and led projects on the modeling of failure of porous ceramics, the production of hybrid materials and the prediction of the endurance limit of steels. Since March 2017 Mr. Hochrainer is full professor at TU Graz, where he is establishing a group for mesoscale materials modeling, where he continues his work on dislocation based crystal plasticity, but also works on modeling granular materials and other stochastic materials.