Director Institute Branch Sulzbach-Rosenberg

On 1 March 2021, Professor Dr.-Ing. Matthias Franke took over the management of the Sulzbach-Rosenberg branch of Fraunhofer UMSICHT. Franke graduated in engineering from the University of Rostock with a degree in land culture and environmental protection and subsequently received his doctorate in waste management. At the Fraunhofer Institute branch in Sulzbach-Rosenberg and its legal predecessor, the ATZ Development Centre, he headed the department of recycling management for over 10 years. His main areas of work include the development of waste management and resource strategies as well as the energetic and material recycling of waste and residues. More recent fields of research that Matthias Franke has established at the Institute are the chemical recycling of composite materials such as electronic scrap or glass and cohel fibre-reinforced plastics, as well as the decontamination of construction waste via thermal processes. Since 2017, he has been an honorary professor at the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham. Since 2009, he has held a lectureship at the School of Life Sciences at the Technical University of Munich, where he teaches waste management in the international degree programme »Sustainable Resource Management«.