Hermann Staudinger Prize for Kurt Kremer

Kurt Kremer, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany, has been awarded the Hermann Staudinger Prize 2024 by the German Chemical Society (GDCh). The prize was presented at the Biennial Meeting of the GDCh Division of Macromolecular Chemistry in Dresden, Germany, on September 16, 2024.

The award honors outstanding contributions to polymer chemistry. Kurt Kremer received the prize for establishing and applying multiscale modeling methods as a qualitative and quantitative tool for understanding, developing, and processing polymer materials. Kremer developed two important models for computer simulations of polymer properties back in the 1980s: the “Kremer-Grest Bead-Spring Model” [1] and the “Bond Fluctuation Model” [2]. Both are now standard models in polymer simulation and have led to important findings about polymer melts, elastomers, and biopolymers.

Kremer developed multiscale methods that span different orders of magnitude. He succeeded in establishing these methods as a quantitative tool in polymer science and in showing that they can be used for materials science with direct experimental and industrial relevance. More recently, his research covers topics such as innovative theoretical concepts in soft-matter science, e.g., non-equilibrium aspects.

Kurt Kremer was born in 1956. He studied physics at the University of Cologne, Germany, and completed his Ph.D. in 1983 there under the supervision of Kurt Binder and at the Jülich Research Center, Germany. After postdoctoral research at Exxon Research and Engineering Co., Annandale, NJ, USA, he completed his habilitation in theoretical physics at the University of Mainz in 1988. He then returned to the solid state laboratory at Jülich Research Center as a Senior Research Assistant. He spent time as a visiting professor/scientist in the USA at Exxon Research, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. After a short stay at Bayer AG, Leverkusen, Germany, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research.

In addition to other honors, Kremer received the Walter Schottky Prize from the German Physical Society (DPG) in 1992, the American Physical Society (APS) Polymer Physics Prize in 2011, and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2014. He is a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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