Breaking things to build better, safer products

“I want to improve our quality of life and contribute to the engineering community by making vehicles safer and reducing emissions.”

Program:
- Materials Engineering
Campus: Vancouver

What sparked your interest in engineering?

I grew up in southern Germany, which is a major hub for automotive engineering. From a very early age, I was exposed to cars and I was always curious about their technical aspects. That led me to engineering. One highlight in my undergraduate was an internship at Porsche in the crash simulation department, which inspired me to pursue research focused on crash safety and contribute to sustainable and affordable mobility.

Why did you decide to continue with research rather than working in industry?

The accuracy of your simulation outputs or predictions depends on the quality of your inputs. In other words, it influences how well we can describe the material behaviour through equations. The more knowledge you have, the more accurate your predictions will be. I realized that an undergraduate degree wasn’t enough for me to fully leverage these complex concepts, so I decided to pursue further studies.

I received the DAAD scholarship, which funded my master’s degree at the University of Waterloo.

I was part of a large research group doing hands-on and numerical work, which was very rewarding.

Over the two years of my master’s degree, I gained a lot of experience, worked directly with industry sponsors, and shared my work with the engineering community through published articles. A PhD was the next step.

What is your current research focus?

I want to improve our quality of life and contribute to the engineering community by making vehicles safer and reducing emissions.

I do this by developing more realistic methods to characterize and model emerging materials for automotive applications. Traditional tests, like the tensile “dog bone” test, don’t capture the complex boundary conditions present in real manufacturing or crash scenarios. This is problematic because we are using these experiments to develop simulation methods that are then not as reliable as they should be for virtual product design. It also means that you then require multiple machining iterations for your tools to make sure the parts are within tolerance, which is costly and increases the length of time to develop products.

How do you create better simulation models?

I build custom test fixtures, which include designing them in software, prototyping, 3D printing and then machining. These new fixtures are then used to test automotive materials under controlled boundary conditions that mimic what you’d expect in forming operations and crash scenarios.

That means we are breaking things! We use some very fancy camera setups to measure surface strains as they happen in the experiment, so you know how deformation is distributed and what leads to fracture.

This approach enables you to understand true material behaviour within a lab environment. I also examine materials at various scales, from single crystals to structural components like the B-pillar of full-size vehicles. I then use the insight from these tests to develop equations and simulation methods, which are coupled with commercial software products. Sponsors can use these enhanced models to build more reliable forming and crash simulations.

What advice would you give students thinking about what and where to study?

The skills you learn in undergraduate engineering are very transferrable. For example, I teach my students fundamental skills in advanced experimental characterization. That’s not just limited to automotive materials – there are applications in biomedical engineering, composites and other areas. The same goes for simulations. We develop the skills, the theories and the methods, but the applications are very broad.

I strongly believe in the value of exposing students to research early on in their academic studies – it’s a great way to learn beyond textbook understanding.

I prefer to keep things flexible, so rather than posting a specific opening with requirements, I enjoy tailoring a position to the interests and skills of the student. Undergraduates gain hands-on experience and learn to connect theory with real-world examples.

As for studying at UBC, the university offers a combination of academic excellence – which includes infrastructure and a focus on interdisciplinarity – and quality of life. It’s a hub of innovation where students can push themselves to grow both personally and professionally. Also, while studies are definitely important, a life outside of university matters. Vancouver offers a wonderful mixture of outdoor activities that complement the academic experience.