New University Leadership Determined

Three Vice Presidents were elected by the Senate to five-year terms in office

On October 11, 2016, the Senate of the Chemnitz University of Technology selected three Vice Presidents from among the members of the University. The elected officials include mechanical engineer Prof. Dr. Jörn Ihlemann, media computer scientist Prof. Dr. Maximilian Eibl and economist Prof. Dr. Uwe Götze. The candidates, recommended by President Prof. Dr. Gerd Strohmeier, were each unanimously elected by the members of the Senate in attendance. This was an “excellent vote of confidence”, according to Strohmeier. Effective immediately, these Vice Presidents represent the new University Leadership, together with the President who was inaugurated on October 1st and Chancellor Eberhard Alles. Prof. Strohmeier issued the following statement about the newest elected officials at the university: “I am looking forward to the next five years of constructive, trust-based cooperation.”

Prof. Dr. Jörn Ihlemann, who holds the Professorship of Mechanics of Solids, will now also be active as the Vice President for Research and Junior Researchers. Prof. Dr. Maximilien Eibl takes up the post of Vice President for Academic and International Affairs. And the leader of the Professorship of Management Accounting and Controlling, Prof. Dr. Uwe Götze, contributes his experience as the Vice President for Transfer and Academic Qualification. The areas of responsibility for each post were discussed in July in the Senate of Chemnitz University of Technology. “Further overarching domains, like university development planning and gender equality, for example, are assigned to the University Management as a whole,” explains Strohmeier.

Prof. Strohmeier recognized the work of the previous Vice Presidents Prof. Dr. Heinrich Lang, Prof. Dr. Andreas Schubert and Prof. Dr. Christoph Fasbender in the University Leadership under the last elected President, Prof. Dr. Arnold van Zyl.

Presenting: The new Vice Presidents of the TU Chemnitz

Prof. Dr. Jörn Ihlemann, Vice President for Research and Junior Researchers

Jörn Ihlemann was born in Hildesheim in 1967. From 1987 through 1993, he studied mechanical engineering at the Universität Hannover, specializing in the field of development and construction engineering, where he later worked as a research associate and then completed his doctoral degree and Habilitation. In 2006, he transferred to the Deutsche Institut für Kautschuktechnologie e. V. (The German Institute of Rubber Technology, DIK), where he formed and directed the Department of Simulation and Continuum Mechanics. In October 2007, he was appointed to the Professorship of Mechanics of Solids at the Chemnitz University of Technology. One year later, the then-standalone Professorship of Experimental Mechanics was incorporated. His current research interests include component and process simulation, material modeling, simulation-aided experimental mechanics and self-organization phenomena in engineering applications. He has led the Institute of Mechanics and Thermodynamics since 2008 as well as directed the Applied Mechanics degree program at the Chemnitz University of Technology. In the HALS collaborative research center – "High-strength aluminium-based lightweight materials for safety components" – he is a member of the executive board and deputy spokesperson. In the Federal Cluster of Excellence MERGE, he is also active as a member of the executive board and leads the IRD F research domain - Modelling, Integrative Simulation and Optimisation. In addition, he represents the Chemnitz University of Technology in the Faculty Council for Mechanical and Process Engineering and in the Deutsche Kautschuk-Gesellschaft e. V. (The German Rubber Society, DKG) as a member of the Executive Council and the Research Advisory Board.

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Eibl, Vice President for Academic and International Affairs

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Eibl was born in 1969 in Bochum and grew up in Trier. He studied information science at the Universität Regensburg from 1989 until 1995, as well as computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) and the University of Sheffield (UK). From 1996 through 1999, he was a research associate at the German Social Science Infrastructure Services Association (today GESIS) in Bonn, where he researched interactive information retrieval. After completing a doctoral degree in computer science at the University of Koblenz-Landau, he was the senior executive of GESIS at their Berlin branch. During this time, he also lectured at the Universities of Koblenz-Landau and Hildesheim, as well as at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2006, he came to the Chemnitz University of Technology and the Professorship of Media Informatics. His main research emphases are information retrieval and human computer interaction. From 2006 through 2013, he was Dean of Studies in the Faculty of Computer Science. Before being selected as Vice President, Prof. Eibl served on the Senate of the Chemnitz University of Technology since 2014 and has been a member of the faculty council of the Faculty of Computer Science since 2006. He is an expert reviewer for numerous professional conferences and publications, including the DFG, BMBF and the Deutsch-Französische Hochschule, a university network which promotes cooperation between German and French universities. Since August 2016 he is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of California in Berkeley.

Prof. Dr. Uwe Götze, Vice President for Transfer and Academic Qualification

Prof. Dr. Uwe Götze completed the first phases of his academic career at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, where he studied business administration and completed his doctoral degree and Habilitation. Since 1997, he has held the Professorship of Management Accounting and Controlling at the Chemnitz University of Technology. Here, he teaches and researches the classic economic topics of cost accounting and management, investment calculation, strategic management and controlling (including as co-editor of the Journal of Management Control), as well as such interdisciplinary topics as the intersection of business administration and engineering sciences. This encompasses subprojects in the HALS collaborative research center – "High-strength aluminium-based lightweight materials for safety components" –, in Cluster eniPROD of the State Excellence Initiative and the Federal Cluster of Excellence MERGE. In conjunction with these and other research projects as well as student education, Prof. Götze has helped to coordinate the transfer of knowledge into business practice in many various ways. In the field of continuing education, he was significantly involved in the development, implementation and execution of extra-occupational bachelor and master degree programs. In addition, as a member of the Faculty Council, Senate and University Council, Vice-Dean and Dean of Studies and as Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, he has actively participated in academic self-governance.

(Translation: Sarah Wilson)

Mario Steinebach
17.10.2016

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