In his letter dated February 1, 2023, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has appointed Prof. Wolfgang Lehner to the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat, WR), the oldest science policy advisory body in Europe. The WR advises the federal and state governments in Germany on all matters surrounding the development of the structure and content of science, research and higher education.

Prof. Lehner has been a professor of databases at TU Dresden since 2002 and Director of the Institute of Systems Architecture since 2006. His research comprises the design of data management infrastructures in large, widespread information systems, the development of novel database functions for supporting data science and machine learning algorithms, and the research of acceleration methods and technologies for queries in large data volumes. Prof. Lehner is very active in the science community in Germany and abroad. In 2019, he became a member of the Senate Committee and the Grants Committee for Collaborative Research Centers of the German Research Foundation (DFG). He has been a member of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) Administrative Board since 2014. Furthermore, he is involved with all high-ranking program committees at conferences hosted by the database community, he is the managing editor of the technical journal PVLDB and a reviewer for notable research organizations in Germany and abroad. He has also been involved in numerous third party-funded research projects at TU Dresden.

Wolfgang Lehner maintains research relations with SAP HANA research groups in Walldorf, Germany, as well as the US, Korea and Canada, and he is affiliated with industry collaborations with research centers in Germany and the US.

In 2021, he was selected for the DFG-funded Reinhart Koselleck Program, which offers outstanding researchers who have made documented scientific achievements the opportunity to pursue particularly innovative and risky projects.

Lehner considers his appointment to the WR a great honor and an excellent opportunity to contribute to a promising future within this committee. He says, “In shaping digitalization efforts, the transfer of scientific findings to industry and society – particularly with regard to the role of data – is paramount to me. I feel especially compelled to work in keeping with the principles of open science, such as open access, open code and the reproducibility of research findings.”

More information:
https://www.wissenschaftsrat.de
https://wwwdb.inf.tu-dresden.de/our-group/team/wolfgang-lehner/

Contact:
Prof. Wolfgang Lehner
Tel.:  +49 351 463-38383