Kurt Kremer is currently Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP) in Mainz, Germany. Prior to that, he headed the Polymer Theory Department at MPIP for nearly 29 years, until June 2024. He earned his Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of Kurt Binder, then a professor in Cologne, at the National Research Center (KFA) in Jülich. Before moving to MPIP, he worked at KFA Jülich, Exxon Research and Engineering in Annandale, NJ, and the University of Mainz, with extended stays at Bayer Materials Science in Leverkusen, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Minnesota. Early in his career, he developed two of the most widely used models for computer simulations of generic polymer properties: the Kremer-Grest bead-spring model and the Bond Fluctuation Model. These models have proven to be highly suitable for both the static and dynamic properties of polymers. They have become the standard in polymer physics modeling. To this day, these models and their variants are used in numerous studies of polymer dynamics, rheology, and active systems. He subsequently extended his work to gels and networks, as well as to polyelectrolytes. For the latter, he was one of the coordinating scientists of the first German-French Priority Program funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Over the years, he developed scale-bridging simulations capable of linking chemistry-specific and generic scaling properties. This early multiscale work was then extended to functional (bio)polymers and polymer electronics. Currently, his work focuses on multiscale modeling of complex macromolecular structures, with an emphasis on adaptive resolution approaches to capture molecular processes and open systems. Kurt Kremer has received several honors for his work and is a member of the German National Academy Leopoldina and the Academy of Europe.
