Wolfgang Bangerth is a professor of mathematics and geosciences at Colorado State University. His research focuses on computer simulations as well as processes in deep earth.  

Bangerth says he sees himself as a “technology transfer agent.” Mathematicians and computer scientists have developed the underpinning for computer simulations for the last 50 years, but they are often too complicated for geoscientists, chemists, biologists and engineers to use.   

Bangerth works to bridge this gap by working with applied scientists to build simulators for the processes they want to simulate in computers, be it air flowing around cars/planes, water flowing around ships or how objects deform under external forces, like high rises in wind.  

He received his Ph.D at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and later worked at thedepartments of computational science, geophysics, chemistry, mathematics and geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and finally CSU.

Bangerth’s research has been published in a wide and interdisciplinary range of journals, including the SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing, the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Solid Earth, Journal of Computational Chemistry and many others.