Wolfram KOCH

Wolfram Koch (born 1959) studied chemistry at the Technical Universities in Darmstadt and Berlin. He obtained his PhD in computational organic chemistry at TU Berlin in 1986 with Prof. Helmut Schwarz. He then worked for IBM as a scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California/USA and at IBM Germany's Scientific Center in Heidelberg. In 1991 Koch was appointed Professor of Theoretical Organic Chemistry at TU Berlin. In November 1998 he left academia and joined the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh, German Chemical society) in Frankfurt. Since November 2002 he is GDCh's executive director. During his time active in research Koch authored and co-authored some 190 papers in peer reviewed journals and a textbook on density functional theory. He is a member of several advisory and governing boards of scientific institutions in Germany, a member of the Executive Board of the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences (EuCheMS), a member of the Finance Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), member of Administrative Council of the Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort (German Copyright Collective) and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Technische Informationsbibliothek (German National Library of Science and Technology). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and an IUPAC Fellow and holds an honorary membership of the Czech Chemical Society. Wolfram Koch is married and father of two daughters.

About GDCh The Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) is the largest chemical society in continental Europe with ca. 30,000 members from academe, industry and other areas. The GDCh supports chemistry in teaching, research and application and promotes the understanding of chemistry in the public. It owns and co-owns a number of scientific journals, including Angewandte Chemie, one of the prime chemistry journals in the world. The society was founded in 1949 as a not-for-profit association but builds on a long tradition that began in 1867 when its first predecessor organization was founded in Berlin. At its headquarter in Frankfurt am Main the society employs some 50 staff members which run the society's administration and support the GDCh members in their diverse activities.