Jan Torgersen

Jan Torgersen is Chair of Materials Science at the School of Engineering and Design at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Head of the Materials Testing Office for Mechanical Engineering. Torgersen studied Industrial and Mechanical Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), where he graduated from the Institute for Materials Science with a degree in engineering (Dipl.- Ing.) in 2010 and received his doctorate in technical sciences (Dr. techn.) in 2013.

He pioneered the fabrication of hydrogels using two-photon lithography, a high-resolution lithography-based additive manufacturing technology that can be used to produce three-dimensional devices over multiple length scales, from sub 100 nm to the cm scale. He was successful in fabricating scaffold materials for tissue engineering directly in the presence of living organisms to create a dynamic cell culture environment. His interest in the interplay between the nanoscale and the mesoscale brought him to Stanford University, where he worked at the Nanoscale Prototyping Laboratory (NPL) on materials for energy conversion and storage starting early 2014. He focused on thin film components such as capacitors for DRAM production, buffer layers for solar cells and catalytic layers for fuel cells.

In 2016, he was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he continued his work at the interface between surface functionality and device topology. He worked on metallic biomaterials, specifically on reducing stress corrosion cracking of Mg alloys and on surface and topology optimization to improve the biological properties of Ti-based implants. He also dealt with the topology optimization of lens arrays to increase the efficiency of components for energy conversion, in particular solar cells, and fuel cells, for which tailored manufacturing processes based on lithography and thin-film technology were developed. In 2020 he habilitated at NTNU and was appointed at TUM in 2022, where Torgersen continues his work in the field of creating and optimizing materials for energy conversion and storage.