Mehrmann studied mathematics at
Bielefeld University, where he earned his Diploma (equivalent to an undergraduate degree) in 1979. He completed his Ph.D. there in 1982 under the supervision of Ludwig F. Elsner, following a spell at
Kent State University, where he worked under
Richard S. Varga. His dissertation was "On classes of matrices containing M-matrices and hermitian positive semidefinite matrices". He also received his
habilitation in 1987 from the same university. From 1990 to 1992 Mehrmann was a
Vertretungsprofessor (interim professor) at the
RWTH Aachen University. From 1993 to 2000 he was a professor at the
Chemnitz University of Technology. Since 2000 he has been a professor at the Institute for Mathematics at
Technische Universität Berlin. From June 2008 to May 2016 he was the spokesperson for the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft's mathematical center called
Matheon. From January 2011 to December 2013 he was president of the
Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (GAMM). In 2011 he received from the
European Research Council (ERC) an advanced grant for modeling, simulation, and control of
multiphysics systems. ==Awards and honors==