Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Christian Mittelstedt studied civil engineering at the University of Wuppertal, where he graduated as Dipl.-Ing. in 1999. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Siegen in 2005 with a dissertation on stress concentration problems in composite laminates. From 2006 he worked in the German aerospace industry as a research engineer and from 2011 as a technical leader and expert in the field of structural analysis. He habilitated in 2012 with a thesis on the stability of thin-walled fibre composite components in lightweight construction and is the author and co-author of more than 200 scientific papers published in international journals, conference proceedings, but also officially recognised calculation manuals. Since August 2016, he has been head of the institute of Lightweight Engineering and Structural Mechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Darmstadt University of Technology.