Andreas Reuter Appointed Senior Professor at Heidelberg University
28 October 2015
Photo: HITS / Gülay Keskin
The Heidelberg based expert on information technologies, Prof. Dr. Andreas Reuter, has been appointed senior professor of Heidelberg University. With his appointment in October Andreas Reuter took over the task to extend the IT infrastructure of Heidelberg University in cooperation with other research institutions in the region within the next three years. The focus of this task will be requirement specifications which emerge from the so called data-driven sciences. For this purpose, he will work closely with all involved organisations. Andreas Reuter is managing director of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and its sister organisation EML European Media Laboratory GmbH. Until his retirement he held the endowed chair “Distributed Systems” – supported by Klaus Tschira Foundation – at Heidelberg University.
Heidelberg University bestows the title of senior professorship to excellent scientists and academic teachers. With these appointments, the University pursues the goal to further use the wealth of experience of retired professors. Apart from developing the University’s infrastructure, Andreas Reuter will also build connections to other IT services. Additional to the research institutions in the region, also partners from the private enterprise sector are to be included in the process. Another remit will be the curriculum development to further integrate the methods of computational science into all fields.
Andreas Reuter started his career as an independent consultant for designing and implementing database applications. In 1981 he received his Ph.D. from Technical University of Darmstadt and subsequently became an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Kaiserlautern. In 1983 and 1984 he was a visiting scientist at the IBM Research Lab in San José/California (USA). From 1985 to 1997 he was a Full Professor at the University of Stuttgart, where he later founded the Institute of Parallel and Distributed High Performance Systems In 1997 he participated in the initiative to establish a private university with a focus on Information Technology which eventually became the International University in Germany. For some time, he served there as Vice President. In 1997, he declined the call to become scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics at Saarbrücken; instead, he accepted Klaus Tschira´s offer to build up the European Media Laboratory. From 2006 to 2011 he held the endowed chair „Dependable Systems” at the University of Kaiserslautern. Since 2011 he was professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Heidelberg University. Prof. Reuter is board member of the HITS- Foundation and of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation.
Andreas Reuter’s research focuses are databases, transaction systems as well as parallel and distributed systems. In addition to his research, he conducted numerous consulting projects and lectured extensively on various subjects in academia and industry. He serves on various advisory boards in industry and research organisations and has been elected as an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics at Saarbrücken.
