­Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel awarded the TU Dresden Medal of Honor

TUD Dresden University of Technology (TUD) honored distinguished individuals for their extraordinary commitment and outstanding service to the university during a ceremonial event held in the Dülfer Hall on Friday. Among them was Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel, founding director of the CIDS - Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences and long-standing director of the ZIH - Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing.

Prof. Nagel received the TUD Medal of Honor, the university’s highest distinction awarded in recognition of outstanding service, for his exceptional achievements, which have had a lasting impact on TUD’s digital research landscape for almost three decades.

In his laudation, Prof. Dr. Lars Bernard, Vice-Rector Digitalization and University Development and Chief Digital Information Officer of TUD, emphasized how fundamental Prof. Nagel's contribution is to the strategic development of TU Dresden:"Wolfgang Nagel has contributed in many ways and decisively to the fact that our university today sets national and international standards in digital science. The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences - CIDS is the masterpiece of his work for TUD, and our successes in the Excellence Strategy are its crowning glory."

Since 1997, Prof. Nagel has played a key role in advancing modern research infrastructures as Chair of Computer Architecture and, since 2005, as Director of the ZIH. Under his leadership, the ZIH developed into a high-performance center for data-intensive science. As Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science (2006–2009), Prof. Nagel also helped shape the faculty’s development – including its move to the new building on Nöthnitzer Straße and the targeted promotion of early-career researchers. The establishment of the first high-performance computing and storage complex (HRSK), the continuous advancement toward data-intensive high-performance computing, and the nationwide recognition of the ZIH as a site within the National High-Performance Computing network (NHR) are among the defining milestones of his work. With the founding of ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, one of the five national AI competence centers in Germany, Prof. Nagel expanded the scientific expertise at the location to include key topics such as big data and artificial intelligence.

His pioneering work led to the founding of CIDS – a center that bundles digitization in all its breadth and across all disciplines as a strategic field of research at TUD. Prof. Nagel has been continuously driving the conceptual development of CIDS since 2009 and has been committed to its institutional anchoring for many years - until its official foundation in 2021 and the current construction work.

His commitment, professional expertise and strategic vision have sustainably strengthened TU Dresden's national and international visibility in the field of digital science. We warmly congratulate Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel on this special and well-deserved award.