Dr. Marcel Schaefer has been leading the Fraunhofer USA office in South Carolina since March 2021. He is the Senior Program Coordinator for Fraunhofer USA’s activities within the South Carolina Fraunhofer USA Alliance, which offers 50% co-funding on all projects with Fraunhofer. Projects so far cover a broad spectrum ranging from Artificial Intelligence, Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, Digitization, Predictive Analytics to sustainability, renewable energy, battery, hydrogen, and other innovative and emerging technologies. Typically, those projects have a strong manufacturing focus.

Dr. Marcel Schaefer has been a Senior Research Scientist for Fraunhofer USA since January 2019. From 2009 to 2018, he was with the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technologies SIT in Darmstadt, Germany.

He holds a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Wuppertal, Germany, and a PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. As PI, Co-PI, and researcher, Dr. Schaefer has led and worked on various projects that discover new challenges and opportunities broadly spread over the fields of cybersecurity and software engineering in both the public and private sectors.

From his office in South Carolina, Marcel is thriving to expand the Fraunhofer brand in the state and the whole southeast region. His goal is to institutionalize Fraunhofer USA as an established organization in South Carolina and to bring the newest technology “made by Fraunhofer” from the global Fraunhofer network into the South.