Ernst Homburg (born 2 August 1952 in Venlo) is a Dutch emeritus professor of History of Science and Technology at Maastricht University.

In the period from 1989 to 1993 he was also a part-time assistant professor for History of Technology in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Technical University Eindhoven.

[1] In 1993 he received his Doctorate in History at the University of Nijmegen with a dissertation entitled Van beroep "Chemiker": De opkomst van de industriële chemicus en het polytechnische onderwijs in Duitsland, 1790-1850 ("Chemiker" by occupation : the rise of the industrial chemist and polytechnic education in Germany, 1790-1850).

In 1993 Ernst Homburg was senior research fellow at the Sidney M. Edelstein Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Homburg considers the transformation of polytechnic and university chemical education more as a cause than as a consequence of the emergence of the occupation of the chemist.

[8] Many scholars, that wrote about the development of the chemist's occupation in the context of the development of university education, like Joseph Ben-David,[9] Bernard Henry Gustin,[10] Erica Hickel,[11] Ingunn Possehl,[12] R. Steven Turner[13] and Ulrike Köster,[14] had created the impression that the emergence of the chemical occupation was the exclusive result of the work of Justus von Liebig (1803-1873).

No reference was made to the interplay between events in this particular domain of work and knowledge and the development of the social division of labour as a whole.