Portrait of Professor Herlitzius
Prof. Herlitzius has held the Chair of Agricultural Systems Technology since 2007 and has been Director of the newly founded Institute of Natural Materials Technology since 2016. From 2008 to 2016, he also headed the Scientific Advisory Board of the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Engineering in Potsdam. He was born in Freiberg/Saxony in 1961.
Without agricultural systems engineering ... and the development of mobile machinery for agriculture, we would still have scythes and flails today. Our vision is to develop and improve machines and processes that provide healthy food and energy for the world's ever-growing population. Digitalization, cobotics and sustainable processes for the purpose of conserving resources and ensuring biodiversity represent a completely new challenge.
Being a professor... means being able to help train the most important resource of all - future engineers - to develop construction, computer science, mechatronics, electrical engineering and interdisciplinary agricultural machinery and equipment.
The ideal student ... is interested, motivated and creative. They speak fluent English and are curious about the world and the challenges that cannot be big enough. The scientific and technical basics are the tools of the trade and the soft skills create the ability to work in a team.
In the future ... not just seven billion people will have to be fed, but nine billion - and that with the rising standard of living in emerging countries. In addition, energy is to be produced and oil replaced, although the world's arable land can only be increased slightly. We don't yet know exactly how we can achieve this, but the machine systems we need for this will have to be devised and developed in the coming years.
If I could study again ... I would become an engineer again. However, I would learn to type ten-finger blind and struggle through at least two foreign languages.
Excellence ... is something that everyone should strive for, with or without the help of an initiative.