Dietmar Rempfer, Ph.D.

College of Engineering / Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Dietmar Rempfer was awarded a PhD for his work on low-dimensional models and chaos in boundary-layer transition from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 1991, and he finished his Habilitation in Fluid Mechanics at the same university in 1995.

He has received the Hermann-Reissner Award for Aerospace Engineering in 1992, and a Heisenberg Fellowship in 1995. In 1996, Rempfer joined Cornell University as a Visiting Associate Professor where he worked with John Lumley on low-dimensional models for transitional and turbulent flows. In 2001, he became a faculty member at Illinois Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering, where he was promoted to Professor in 2012. From 2004 to 2017 he also held joint appointments in IIT’s Department of Applied Mathematics, first as an Associate Professor and, starting in 2012, as a Professor of Applied Mathematics.

Rempfer has served as Associate Dean for IIT’s Armour College of Engineering from 2012 to 2015, and as Interim Chair of the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering from June 2015 through August 2016. In July of 2017 he assumed the position of the Founding Director of the School of Engineering at Purdue University Northwest. In May of 2021 he became the Interim Dean of Engineering and Sciences at Purdue Northwest. As of July of 2023, Dr. Rempfer is leading the College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. He has been a member of the Global Engineering Deans Council and its Executive Committee since 2018 and 2020, respectively, and he is a member of the Executive Committee of ASEE’s Engineering Deans Council since 2023.

Rempfer’s main research interests have covered topics in theoretical and applied fluid dynamics and turbulence, unsteady aerodynamics, and applications of dynamical systems theory and numerical methods to problems in fluid mechanics.