Awardee Interviews | Biography: Peter Bruggeman
Peter Bruggeman
Dr. Peter Bruggeman is currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the High Temperature and Plasma Laboratory (HTPL) at the University of Minnesota. HTPL was founded in 1964 by Professor Emil Pfender and the lab has been a well-known center of plasma research for many decades. Peter obtained his PhD from Ghent University, Belgium, in 2008 and was an Assistant Professor of Applied Physics at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, from 2009 until he joined the University of Minnesota in 2013 as an Associate Professor. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2017.
His primary research interests are plasmaliquid interactions and non-equilibrium plasma kinetics and chemistry applied to plasma processes for environmental, biomedical and renewable energy technologies. A significant part of his research is focused on the fundamental physical and chemical processes of atmospheric pressure non-equilibrium plasmas enabling these applications. Peter has intensively worked on innovative diagnostics methods required due to the complex high collisional and non-equilibrium conditions of atmospheric pressure plasmas.
He has published over 95 papers in peerreviewed journals of which 12 have been selected as journal highlights. He has delivered invited and keynote lectures at over 60 international meetings and was a lecturer at several summer schools in Germany, USA, Canada and Brazil. His research has been recognized by several awards including the 2012 Hershkowitz Early Career Award, the 2013 Institute of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist Medal and Prize in Plasma Physics and the 2016 US Department of Energy Early Career Award.
Peter is an active member of his research community. He is currently the section editor for Plasmas and Plasma-Surface Interactions of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics (Institute of Physics Publishing) and serves as an editorial board member of several other journals. He also co-edited the prestigious “2017 Plasma Roadmap” giving directions for the future development of the field of low temperature plasma. Peter is also an elected member of the board of directors of the International Society of Plasma Chemistry and was a member of the management committee of the European COST action MP1101 from 2011 until he relocated to the United States in 2013.
He has been a member of more than a dozen international scientific and organizing committees of meetings in his research field. He is the elected chair of the 2018 Gordon Research Conference on Plasma Processing Science that will take place this summer and organized the conference “Frontiers in Low Temperature Plasma Diagnostics X” in 2013 in the Netherlands. He has been for several years involved in the organization of the International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) as organizing session chair or technical area coordinator and was a co-organizer of a session at the Material Research Symposium in 2015 and 2016. He was also a member of the program committee and session co-chair of the session “Plasma diagnostic and growth processes” at the “International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films” in 2017 organized by AVS.