Thomas Weiland (born 24 October 1951) is a German electrical engineer, physicist and entrepreneur. He is a professor of electrical engineering and headed the Institute of Electromagnetic Field Theory at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technical University of Darmstadt from 1989 to 2017. In 1988, Weiland was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He was also named an IEEE Fellow in the year 2012, for development of the finite integration technique and impact of the associated software on electromagnetic engineering.
Early life and education Thomas Weiland was born on 24 October 1951 in Riegelsberg, which was then a part of Saar Protectorate. From 1961 to 1970, he attended the Ludwigsgymnasium in Saarbrücken. His thirst for research became apparent early on here, as he received six mathematics and physics prizes at state and national level while still a student. This also included several successful participations in the Jugend forscht program, which was already very popular at the time. After being accepted into the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's study sponsorship program, Weiland studied at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (TH Darmstadt) beginning in 1970. He graduated there in 1975 with a diploma in Theoretical Electrical Engineering.
Scientific career As a research assistant at the Chair of Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, Thomas Weiland remained in TH Darmstadt for the next four years after receiving his diploma. In the meantime, he received his doctorate in engineering in 1977. In 1979, he joined the Theory Group at the CERN particle laboratory in Switzerland as a fellow. From 1981, he worked as a research associate at the DESY research center in Hamburg and headed the Electromagnetic Fields Group there from 1982 to 1989. In parallel, he led the Wakefield Accelerator Research Group and here he was able to eventually prove the wakefield transformation – which was previously invented by himself and G.A. Voss – with his wakefield experiment in 1987. Also within this period, Weiland completed his habilitation in experimental physics at the University of Hamburg (1984). Furthermore, in the first half of the 1980s Weiland was a visiting scientist at scientific institutions in the U.S. and Japan several times, including Stanford University. Subsequently, he turned down several offers of professorships in Texas and Berlin, taking over as chair of Electromagnetic Field Theory at the TH Darmstadt (later renamed TU Darmstadt) in 1989 – a position he held until 2017. In 1994 and 1997, he spent two sabbaticals at Stanford University and the University of Victoria. Starting in 2000, Weiland, together with several other professors at the TU Darmstadt, pushed a comprehensive computational engineering initiative. From 2003 to 2006, he was chairman of the board of directors of the Computational Engineering Research Center, which had been newly established the year before. In 2007, the founding of the Graduate School of Computational Engineering (Graduate School CE) followed as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments. In the course of his time as professor and head of his institute at the TU Darmstadt, Thomas Weiland guided over 100 doctoral students to a successful doctorate. In turn, ten professorships emerged from the circle of these. Together with his staff, Weiland published almost 1400 scientific publications.
Scientific work Weiland's research focuses on the development of numerical methods for the computation of electromagnetic fields, with applications in electromagnetic compatibility, accelerator physics, computational engineering (computer-aided modeling, simulation, analysis and optimization), time domain analysis and simulation, as well as multiphysics simulation methods and problem solving. Weiland had already dealt with the numerical computation of electromagnetic fields in the course of his doctorate. This was not only to shape his own career. Particularly a few years later, it should revolutionize the general approach to prototype construction within electrical engineering and have a lasting influence on it to this day. A central position of Weiland's calculations and his scientific work is occupied by his development of the finite integration technique (FIT). He first presented this in 1977, as a consistent formulation for the discrete representation of Maxwell's basic electromagnetic equations on spatial grids. Finite Integration Theory (also known as Finite Integration Technique) forms the physical-mathematical basis of simulation programs that are currently almost indispensable in the development of a wide range of technological products, such as mobile phones.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
