Stephan Luckhaus (Leipzig) joins the cluster as a Münster Research Fellow. Luckhaus works on partial differential equations that model physical or bio-medical processes. His main interests are free boundary problems (in general), phase changes and many particle systems as well as geometric theory of nonlinear elasticity and plasticity and applied geometric measure theory.

He is known for his achievements in harmonic maps (interpolation lemma for boundary values), elliptic-parabolic equations (existence of weak solutions with H. W. Alt, extended to Stefan type systems with A. Visintin), mean curvature equations in phase change systems (a capacity type estimate) and filtration flow (results on periodic homogenisation with singular scaling with Bourgeat and Mikelic). He also contributed to the mathematical modeling of tumor growth based on interacting particle systems.

In 2003 he received the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis, since 2002 he is a Member of the Academy of Science and Literature Mainz and in 2007 he was elected as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).