Advisory Board

Bin Chen, PhD. is dedicated to the research of fire safety technology for new energy vehicles, achieving several industry firsts and forming systematic research results including equipment, standards and basic research. He developed the industry's first integrated test platform for multi-source data fusion of new energy vehicle fires, formulated the industry's first 'Electric Vehicle Fire Safety Test Methods' standard, developed the industry's first 'China Electric Vehicle Fire Safety Index', and set up the industry's leading fire prevention, control and investigation system for new energy vehicles. He established the industry-leading new energy vehicle fire prevention system of prevention, control and investigation. Dr. Bin presided over/participated in more than 10 scientific research projects at national, provincial and ministerial levels, applied for more than 10 patents and software copyrights, and published more than 20 SCI/EI papers.

Maren Finck is a Project Manager at carhs.training gmbh. From 2008 - 2015 she worked at EDAG as a project manager responsible for vehicle safety. Previously, she worked several years at carhs GmbH and TECOSIM as an analysis engineer with a focus on pedestrian safety and biomechanics. Maren has been a firefighter at the local fire station since 1994 and uses her experience as a technical rescue instructor.

After studying mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen Mark Gevers joined TECOSIM as a CAE Engineer in 2001. From 2008 to 2019 he has been General Manager of TECOSIMs branch office in Cologne. Since 2019 he is in charge of TECOSIM's e-mobility and benchmarking activities as Director Business Development. For four years he has been assistant professor for material simulations.

Stefan Hiermaier studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of German Armed Forces in Munich and obtained his doctorate from the Faculty of Civil Engineering. His habilitation on high-speed dynamics of materials dates from 2002. Stefan Hiermaier was appointed the first Professor in the field of high-speed dynamics in Germany in 2008. 2015 Hiermaier was appointed Professor for Sustainable Systems Engineering at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. He is both Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics and Director of the Department of Sustainable Systems Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. He is also vice-dean of the faculty and co-coordinator of the Sustainability Center Freiburg, a co-operation of the five Fraunhofer Institutes in Freiburg and the Albert-Ludwigs-University. Stefan Hiermaier’s major research interest is Resilient Dynamics, i.e. resilience of complex critical infrastructure. One focus is the dynamic behavior and shock wave physics of materials and structures integrating experimental and numerical methods. Major issues are discretization methods and constitutive equations for materials under crash and impact loads. Design of Critical Infrastructure towards more resilience with respect to disruptive events and related uncertainties is the research Stefan Hiermaier persues entitled as Resilience Engineering. Stefan Hiermaier has written numerous publications on these topics. His book “Structures Under Crash and Impact” was published by Springer in 2008. Stefan Hiermaier has been president of the DYMAT association (European association for the promotion of research into the dynamic behaviour of materials and its applications) since 2012.

Rainer Justen has more than 30 years of experience in the field of vehicle safety. After his studies in mechanical engineering with a focus on automotive engineering he started his career in the automotive development at Daimler AG in 1987. Several career milestones in the fields of vehicle safety, project management, safety concepts and active safety / driver assistance systems made him an expert on all relevant topics of automotive safety. Since 2008 he is working in the field of safety for alternative drive systems. Rainer Justen is author of numerous publications and papers on this topic. In 2015 Rainer Justen received the SAE Automotive Safety Award for his work on the Safety of Li-ion Batteries in Electric Vehicles from the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).

Jan Krewinkel studied psychology at the University of Tübingen. The entry into the automotive industry took place at Daimler AG in 2012 with the focus on the development of safety-relevant control and display concepts for various vehicle model series. Since 2019, he has been working in the area of passive safety with the aim of further developing the topic of occupant and environmental protection in the event of thermal runaway and thermal propagation events. The focus of the team is on a holistic view of the vehicle and the possible effect of corresponding events.

After the Masters study of technical physics at Graz University of Technology Christiane Mair started working as a researcher at the VIRTUAL VEHICLE in Austria on battery safety. Her focus is set on vent gas analysis and early battery failure detection. Christiane finished her PhD thesis 2021. The aim of her PhD work was to improve battery safety by gaining insight in the failing behavior of Li-ion cells and examining concepts for early battery failure detection. Since 2022 Christiane leads the battery safety team at VIRTUAL VEHICLE.

ZHOU Qing is a professor at the School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University. Prof. Zhou serves as the Director of Vehicle Safety Committee of the Chinese Society of Automotive Engineers, Associate Editor of International Journal of Impact Engineering, and Council Member of International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury (IRCOBI). Qing Zhou received his BS degree from Peking University and PhD degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. During the period from 1994 to 2003, Dr. Zhou worked at the General Motors R&D Center and the Volpe Center of the US Department of Transportation, respectively. His research interests include vehicle safety, human body impact protection, material and structural failures under impact loads, and crash safety of battery and electric vehicle.