Happy birthday, Helmut Münstedt

Excerpt

In this special issue of Rheologica Acta, friends and coworkers of Prof. Helmut Münstedt, who is one of the leading experts in the field of polymer rheology, celebrate his 70th birthday. Münstedt had a long and successful career. After studying physics at the universities of Braunschweig and then in Stuttgart for his Ph.D. with Wolfgang Pechhold, he joined the polymer laboratory of BASF in 1972. There, he focused on polymer rheology and especially on elongational rheology, which at this time was an almost unknown area. Colleagues from this time praise his certain professorial touch. In 1982, he left rheology for the study of intrinsically electrically conductive polymers. The research of his team resulted in the first prototype of a polymer battery. However, BASF closed down this research effort, as electrically conducting polymers at that time were insufficiently stable. Following this, he transferred to technical sales and was promoted to director, responsible for selling over 450,000 tons of LDPE per year at that time. This could have become a career in the upper management of BASF. However, the scientific world had not forgotten Münstedt and pushed him to become professor. After having turned down a faculty position at the Technical University Berlin in 1989, he eventually joined Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in 1993, where he took the Lehrstuhl für Polymerwerkstoffe (Institute of Polymer Materials, LSP) to succeed Friedrich R. Schwarzl. In Erlangen, he returned to his beloved rheology and also built a world-class analytics lab. The institute allowed him and his PhD students to cooperate with macromolecular chemists to obtain polymers with well-defined topographies so that he could explore their rheology. Among the cooperation partners were the groups of Eisenbach (Stuttgart), Lunkwitz (Dresden), and Kaminsky (Hamburg). Münstedt used rheology to probe molecular architecture. LSP became one of the few places in the world, where a complete analytical and rheological characterization of polymers can be performed in house. …