Prof. Dr. Hans Jürgen Prömel

"Digitalisation will have a lasting impact on the future of humanity in all areas of life, including how we teach and learn. German UDS is setting standards for what learning at universities will look like in the future."

He studied mathematics and economics at Bielefeld University from 1974 to 1979 and received his doctorate in mathematics there in 1982. From 1984 to 1985, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1988, he accepted a full professorship in discrete mathematics at the University of Bonn, and in 1994 he moved to the Chair of Algorithms and Complexity at Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2000 to 2007, he served as Vice President for Research there and was acting president of Humboldt University in 2005.

In 2007, he was elected president of the Technical University of Darmstadt and took office on October 1 of that year. In 2013, he was confirmed for a second term and served until 2019.

In February 2021, he became the founding president of the Technical University of Nuremberg, which is currently under construction, and held this office until April 2024. Since July 2024, he has been acting president of the University of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover.

His main areas of scientific work are combinatorics and graph theory, with a focus on probabilistic methods and discrete optimization algorithms in mathematics, computer science, and engineering.