Dietmar Rempfer was awarded a PhD for his work on low-dimensional models and chaos in boundary-layer transition from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 1991, and he finished his Habilitation in Fluid Mechanics at the same university in 1995. He has received the Hermann-Reissner Award for Aerospace Engineering in 1992, and a Heisenberg Grant from the German DFG (Deutsche Forschungegemeinschaft) in 1995.

In 1996, Dr. Rempfer went to Cornell University as a Visiting Associate Professor where he worked with John Lumley on low-dimensional models for transitional and turbulent flows. He joined Illinois Institute of Technology in 2001, serving in a number of capacities including appointments both as Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Departments of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering and Applied Mathematics, respectively. Dr. Rempfer was appointed as Associate Dean for IIT’s Armour College of Engineering from 2012 to 2015, and as Interim Chair of the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering from 2015 to 2016.

In July of 2017 he has assumed the position of the Founding Director of the School of Engineering at Purdue University Northwest and in 2023 he joined Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Arizona, campus as Dean of the College of Engineering. Dr. Rempfer’s research is on topics in theoretical and applied fluid dynamics and turbulence, unsteady aerodynamics, and applications of dynamical systems theory and numerical methods to problems in fluid mechanics.

He is a member of a number of professional and scientific institutes and societies.