Bernhard Hoffschmidt

Bernhard Hoffschmidt is the Director of the Institute of Solar Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). His research focuses on solar thermal power stations, energy flux in porous materials, and the energy efficiency of buildings.

He is also the Managing Director of the Brainergy Park Jülich GmbH, a project corporation of the municipalities Jülich, Titz, and Niederzier. The company is pursuing the development of a new business park in Jülich, which aims to transfer technology from the region’s research facilities into local value creation.

Hoffschmidt was born in 1964 in Cologne. He studied mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen and completed his studies in 1992 as a graduate engineer. In the same year he began his career as a DLR solar research scientist. In 1996 he received his PhD from RWTH Aachen University.

In the period from 2004 until 2009 he set up and headed the project development division within DLR’s solar thermal pilot power plant in Jülich. The first of its kind world-wide, the power plant is based on a number of Hoffschmidt’s and DLR’s inventions. In 2010 he took over the co-direction of the Department of Solar Research at the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics in Stuttgart, from which the Institute of Solar Research was founded in 2011.