The General Assembly of the German Research Foundation (DFG) elected Prof. Gerhard Fettweis and eleven other new members to its Senate during the DFG annual general meeting in Rostock. The DFG is the largest research funding organisation and the central self-governing institution in Germany.

Gerhard Fettweis now has a seat on the DFG Senate in the field of electrical engineering and information technology. He has held the Endowed Vodafone Chair for Mobile Communication Systems at TU Dresden since 1994 and is one of the 5G Lab Germany coordinators. The Senate is the central scientific body in which all important DFG affairs are discussed and decided upon.

Guided by the principles defined by the General Assembly, the Senate advises and decides on all important affairs of the DFG which do not fall within the remit of the Joint Committee. It is therefore responsible for all important decisions relating to research funding prior to the final funding decision and for all important decisions relating to organising the review, assessment and decision-making processes. The Senate decides which review boards should be formed and how they should be structured.

The Senate has 39 members from the scientific and academic communities. The President of the German Rectors' Conference, the Chairman of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities and the President of the Max Planck Society are ex officio members of the Senate. The remaining 36 members are elected for four years on a rolling basis by the General Assembly. Researchers employed by higher education institutions or other research institutions are eligible for election. The Presidents of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft as well as the Chairman of the German Council of Science and Humanities are permanent guests members of the Senate.

Gerhard Fettweis has been Professor of Communication Technology at TU Dresden since 1994. Since 2012, he has been coordinating the TU Dresden Cluster of Excellence Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) and the DFG Collaborative Research Centre "Highly Adaptive Energy Efficient Computing (HAEC)". Furthermore, in 2014, he initiated the "5G Lab Germany" at TU Dresden, where electrical engineers and IT experts work on the development of mobile communication networks. Since 2018, Prof. Fettweis has been the Head of the Barkhausen Institute, which is affiliated with TU Dresden. Gerhard Fettweis is a member of Leopoldina, a long-time IEEE Fellow, as well as a member of acatech. He has an honorary doctorate from TU Tampere in Finland and has received numerous other honours and awards.

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