Prof. Dr. Rainer Stark

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Stark studied mechanical engineering at Ruhr University Bochum and Texas A&M University.

From 1989 to 1994 he worked as research assistant at the Chair of Design Engineering / CAD of the technical faculty of the University of Saarland. His PhD thesis is entitled “Development of a mathematical model on tolerance for the integration in (3D-) CAD systems”.

From 1994 to 1997 he worked as a System Engineer in the Body Engineering department at Ford-Werke AG Cologne. In the following he focused on methods in virtual product creation and was promoted in 1997 to Technical Specialist for CAD, product modeling and product information management.

Between 2002 and 2008 he was leading as European Technical Manager regional and global activities in Methods for Virtual Product Creation within Ford Motor Company. During this time, he also gave numerous guest lectures and presentations at the University of Bochum, the Saarland University Saarbrücken and at the University of Applied Science of Aix-la-Chapelle.

Since February 2008 Prof. Rainer Stark is professor for Industrial Information Technology at the Technical University of Berlin. In addition, he was Director of the Virtual Product Creation division of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK) from 2008 until 2021 and he was the Managing Director of the Department for Machine Tools and Factory Management (IWF) of the Technical University of Berlin from 2011 until 2013.

He is an active researcher and expert in Virtual Product Creation (process, methods and IT-solutions for CAx, PDM/PLM, DMU, AR/VR, Digital Factory, AI und MBSE), Digital Twins as well as Data Engineering & Analytics. Prof. Stark is member of the German Academy of Technical Sciences (acatech), the scientific societies WiGeP (Scientific Society for Product Development), Design Society and CIRP (International Academy for Production Engineering) and board member of the ProSTEP iViP association. He is also an active member of the VDI (Society of German Engineers) board Product Development and Product Management and of the acatech research board Industrie 4.0. Since June 2024 he is member of the speaker team of the research board Industrie 4.0.