Rubberiomics: Goodyear Medalist Heinrich's holistic journey to tires

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.—Attaining a worldly perspective was a difficult proposition for an aspiring academic in East Germany in the 1960s, the height of the Cold War.

From the Soviet Union's perspective, that's exactly what the Berlin Wall was designed to do: prevent top scientific minds from fleeing to the West. Conversely, the wall isolated the East.

Gert Heinrich, winner of the 2025 Charles Goodyear Medal for his groundbreaking work in bringing an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to rubber technology, was one such brilliant young mind growing up in the East, eager to expand his intellectual horizons but prevented from fully doing so.

His walk to school in the city of Pausa (Vogtland landscape) served as a daily reminder that there was much to learn beyond the border between East and West Germany, which was just a few miles away.

"It was difficult or even impossible to visit relatives in West Germany due to the presence of the wall," Heinrich told Rubber News March 13. "Everyday I went to school, I passed the town hall. On the roof of the building, still today, is a globe of the earth. That said to me, 'ok, if you want to understand things locally and what happens locally, you have to understand things globally.'

"You have to understand the world ... that is the message."

Heinrich, senior professor at Faculty of Mechanical Science and Engineering at TU Dresden and the director of the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research TU Dresden, received the industry's most prestigious honor, eponymously named for the man who discovered the vulcanization of rubber.

Heinrich and others received their awards from the American Chemical Society's Rubber Division in Florida March 5.

The Charles Goodyear Medal, sponsored by HF Group and issued annually since 1941, "honors individuals for outstanding invention, innovation or development which has resulted in a significant change or contribution to the nature of the rubber industry."

ACS Rubber Division cited Heinrich's "outstanding significant contributions to research in rubber and polymer science, such as statistical-mechanical and constitutive continuum theory, molecular dynamics, friction theory and fracture mechanics."

Heinrich calls Goodyear the most influential scientist of all time in rubber technology.

"That was and remains Charles Goodyear," Heinrich said. "The discovery of vulcanization with sulfur was the big bang. It made the industrial production of rubber products possible. Since then, polymer materials in general have developed into the materials of the 20th and 21st centuries."

Will Mars, president and CEO of Findlay, Ohio-based Endurica L.L.C., went a step further in his introduction of Heinrich at the Science and Technology Awards.

"I have been coming to meetings like this for 30 years and one of the things that keeps coming back to me is my admiration for the people who win these awards," Mars said. "As a scientist myself, it's about these personal journeys, all of which are very inspiring. Obviously, Dr. Heinrich has pushed the envelope forward for our field.

"A lot of people have seen the Marvel movies with the superheroes, right? I see our award winners as being in that category. If I had to pick a superhero from the Marvel universe for Dr. Heinrich, I would choose Ant Man. If you know his work, he covers many scales—from quantum work, to nano-scale and meso-scale fracture, to macro-scales ... he has done it all.

"You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who has pushed more bright minds into the industry than Prof. Heinrich."

To be precise, Heinrich has mentored 62 students to their doctorates.

"Congratulations to Dr. Gert Heinrich on receiving the 2025 Charles Goodyear Medal, a truly well-earned honor," Subhradeep Mandal, a Heinrich protege who also works at the Leibniz Institute for Polymers TU Dresden, told Rubber News. "His contributions to polymer physics and rubber technology are outstanding, but what stands out even more is his unwavering support as a mentor.

"Always encouraging, always generous with his time, and just like the materials he studies: remarkably elastic, with no sign of fatigue."

Heinrich said he remains available for Ph.D. students and former co-workers still today.

"I am still involved in research projects and act as co-author of publications," he said.

Through his authorship of more than 850 technical papers, Heinrich has been a trailblazer in the realm of rubber research.

Perhaps his greatest achievement has been his continued research in "rubberiomics," a holistic approach to rubber science that incorporates quantum physics, fracture and statistical mechanics, mathematics, engineering, physics and chemistry, among other disciplines.

"It's the ability to see the bigger picture of different scientific disciplines—chemistry, physics and engineering—and how this approach can be of benefit, understanding the interdependencies of various component parts and the ability to transfer this type of thinking to tire technology," Heinrich said.

The approach has been foundational in understanding wet traction, abrasion resistance and rolling resistance, areas that Heinrich came to know implicitly at Continental A.G. in 1990, following the reunification of East and West Germany.

"In this industry, you have to think in this holistic way for sake of the magic triangle," Heinrich said. "This approach is imperative in the tire industry. In projects at Continental, I was forced to think about all three aspects (of the triangle) at the same time.

"One of the goals was to develop laboratory predictors and concepts that would allow accurate prediction of tire properties based on laboratory data. Of course, the business objective was also to save money in the development process of the tire product and to speed up this process."

Heinrich's journey to this all-encompassing approach in polymer networking—indeed, to the global perspective that shapes his thinking today—began in the Vogtland, a picturesque countryside region that still speaks an insular dialect of German today.

Like a scene from the Sound of Music, Pausa is "green and hilly, a beautiful area," Heinrich said, noting that the region was the location of imperial land administrators in the 12th century.

Some 800 years later, Heinrich was born Dec. 13, 1950, in nearby Plauen, East Germany, raised by his grandparents in Pausa after the death of his mother when he was just six months old.

"I do not remember my mother. My grandparents supported me in my interests in books and, for example, financed the setting up of a small chemistry laboratory at home when I was 14 years old," Heinrich said. "They were very simple workers, and they were poor. Of course, there was not a big difference between the the poor and the rich in the city at that time."

Education in schools was free.

"I was raised on eastern side, and with my TV I could watch the programs on the Western side ... so I could learn what happens on both sides, and throughout the world," Heinrich said. "I was starting to become more worldly, reading many new books, with natural science as my main interest."

Mathematics, physics and chemistry also came easily to Heinrich during grammar school.

"I never had difficulties with mathematics and physics," he said. "You had a good school and good teachers there, and they were open to teaching in the afternoon, after school, if you were interested. We had teachers who encouraged these interests, another of which for me was ancient history."

Though his grandparents led a simple, frugal life, Heinrich did grow up with money in his pocket thanks to his work as a bricklayer.

"I always had some money, which we got because we had to learn a trade in addition to our school education at grammar school," Heinrich said. "I learned to be a bricklayer and took the exam before starting university.

"Some of the money was saved, some was spent on books and some was spent in pubs."

Good conversation typically accompanied the good beer.

"I did have some friends in my age group who had the same interests," Heinrich said. "That was very good. We spent a lot of time in the pub drinking beer or playing cards—but we also used this time to discuss natural science, news in chemistry, the news in physics."

His focus in grammar school was on the entirety of the natural world, though he would hone his academic work in physics and quantum mechanics at Friedrich Schiller University in nearby Jena in 1969.

"One must know how I came to polymers, and then to rubbers with a polymer network," Heinrich said. "I learned all of these tools in school."

To this day, an off-kilter steel rod still protrudes from the basement floor of the town hall in Pausa, billed as the "axis of the earth" and a novelty for tourists, little more than a photo op.

But with its asymmetrical direction and the right perspective, the "axis" also points to Heinrich's future in tires, an uneven science that will push the scientist to new heights with his holistic approach.

Heinrich completed his physics and quantum theory studies in Jena in 1973, then worked as a research assistant at Carl Schorlemmer Technical University of Leuna-Merseburg as he pursued his doctorate in theoretical physics.

Fortuitously for Heinrich, the town of Merseburg was located near the city of Buna, where the first industrial plant for the production of synthetic rubber was constructed in 1936.

"It is an interesting place, a small city with a famous university there where I studied physics, and I learned more about automechanics than polymers," Heinrich said. "But these things are useful for polymer science and understanding the behavior of rubber as you try to apply it to rubber in tires."

Heinrich said his doctoral task was to investigate, from a theoretical point of view, the fundamental properties of rubber, using the basics of physics in polymer networks.

This included principles of viscoelastism and entanglement calculus.

"I also had to teach theoretical physics," Heinrich said, leaning on the pioneering principles of Richard Feynman (U.S.) and Sir Sam Edwards (U.K.) in quantum mechanics; and statistical mechanics and particle physics, respectively.

"I could use the tools from quantum mechanics as introduced by Richard Feynman in the 1940s," Heinrich said. "Inspiration also came in particular from Sam Edwards.

"Fortunately, I had a good university education for the technical things. In particular, I benefited from Feynman's formulation of quantum mechanics in the development of constitutive material laws of rubber. There are deep connections in the foundations of thermodynamics and scaling concepts. This was inspiring.

"But I still had no permission to travel to these western countries (of Feynman and Edwards). That was the disadvantage of (not being able to) travel abroad to study."

That all changed in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and East and West Germany were reunified.

"That was a strange and budding time," Heinrich said. "Within one or two years, the university (Schorlemmer in Merseburg) was closed and shifted locations.

"So I decided at that point to leave the place I had been working 16 years. As a family, we decided to leave. I was looking for a position in the western part of Germany, and it was not so easy to find a similar, new position at another university."

Heinrich ultimately accepted a job with Continental in Hanover, taking over as director of the research and development center at the tire maker's headquarters.

"I was in a lucky position brought by chance, because Continental decided at that time to install think tanks that were independent from production and deadlines and all the stress," Heinrich said. "In my interview, I explained that I had done physics of polymer networks. They said, 'You have us convinced that physics is necessary ... to find the compromise for the magic triangle.'

"You must know the chemistry, but the physics makes it possible."

The mathematics and physics behind Heinrich's overarching, holistic approach only got stronger during his 12 years at Continental.

"You had to consider the tire as a part of a larger ecosystem, and a holistic approach was necessary," he said. "Speed, ABS, transfer of lateral and longitudinal forces, the tire interacting with the automotive ecosystem but also with the environment ... all of this continues today with EVs."

The trademarked rubberiomics comprises many tools in the toolbox to help solve and improve upon tire performance challenges.

But the philosophy also refers to the entire ecosystem of a vehicle, each point on the magic triangle as critical as the other two.

"To work effectively in the magic triangle, you have to understand how is (a) tire linked with the vehicle regarding its mechanical/steering behavior; and the detailed behavior of the rubber material components, especially the tread of the tire," Heinrich said.

Other considerations include how viscoelastic rubber behavior under driving conditions is influenced by the components of the rubber (polymers, fillers and vulcanization agents); and environmental conditions, like the arbitrary surface roughness of roads.

The key to properly implementing each academic discipline in Heinrich's rubberiomics certainly includes maintaining an overall interest and competence in all areas, but perhaps more importantly the ability to consider these cross-relationships.

"It's also about maintaining a network of experts from different disciplines with whom you can share details," Heinrich said.

Heinrich also saw successes at Continental in material testing and in garnering a basic understanding of the fracture mechanical properties of rubber in the context of a given testing option.

As the successes continued in more recent years on the academic side at TU Dresden and IPF Dresden, the "ah-ha" moments have not gotten old.

"It's always nice when the scientific findings are put into practice and applied," Heinrich said. "When successors in academic institutes can build on something and continue to research new things with it, that is success."

Exciting new areas of research abound in rubber and tire, all with the possibility of being solved with rubberiomics.

"There are exciting new challenges such as self-healing tires, tires for electrically powered vehicles, sustainable raw materials and the development of completely new rubber crosslinking principles of non-covalent and non-directed crosslinks," he said. "Rubberiomics is the understanding as to how deeply rubber scientists can connect with other fields and disciplines.

"All of these things make the field of rubberiomics very interesting."