Oliver Günther

Oliver Günther

Oliver Günther (born October 22, 1961 in Stuttgart ) is a German business IT specialist and has been President of the University of Potsdam since 2012 .

Life and career

Oliver Günther, son of the dance historian Helmut Günther , was national winner in the federal mathematics competition in 1979 and 1980 and passed his Abitur in 1980 at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart . He studied industrial engineering and mathematics at the University of Karlsruhe , where he graduated in 1984 with a degree in industrial engineering. A study of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley led in 1985 to the Master of Science and 1987 PhD as a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He was a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes throughout his studies and has been a member of the Studienstiftung's selection committee since 1995.

Oliver Günther has been a member of the SPD since 1985.

Professional activity

After a postdoc at the International Computer Science Institute , he worked as an assistant professor (tenure track) at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1988/89 . From 1989 to 1993 he headed the department “Basics of Knowledge Processing / Environmental Information Systems” at the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing ( FAW ) in Ulm. From 1993 to 2011 Günther was Professor of Information Systems at the Humboldt University in Berlin and from 2005 also Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics there. In January 2012 he took over the office of President of the University of Potsdam .

As a business informatics specialist, Günther deals in his research with the profitability of information technology, for example in the context of RFID applications, with IT strategy, business software as well as data protection and security. Professor Günther headed numerous third-party funded projects with funding from the BMBF, the BMWi and the DFG. From 1996 to 2006 he was the spokesman for the Berlin-Brandenburger Graduiertenkolleg "Distributed Information Systems" (DFG GRK 316). On behalf of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, he coordinated the development of an integrated business process library for the German administration from 2009 to 2014.

Günther has been a member of the Gesellschaft für Informatik since 1984 and was its president from 2012 to 2014. During his academic career, he was visiting professor at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications and the Pôle universitaire Léonard-de-Vinci in Paris, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cape Town. In May 2014 Günther was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa) from the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Günther is also an IT strategy consultant and has been involved in setting up several companies, including a. as chairman of the supervisory board of the Berlin voice-over IT provider Poptel AG (1998/99) and CTO of the San Francisco-based cloud provider TeamToolz (2000/01). In autumn 2018 Günther was elected to the German Academy of Science and Engineering acatech . Günther has been a jury member for the Voltaire Prize since 2017 . In 2019, Günther was appointed chairman of the jury of the Berlin-Brandenburg Innovation Prize by the economic administrations of the states of Brandenburg and Berlin .

Fonts (selection)

• with S. Evdokimov and M. Fischmann: Provable Security for Outsourcing Database Operations . In: International Journal of Information Security and Privacy, 4 (1), 2010.
• with B. Fabian: Security Challenges of the EPC Network . In: Communications of the ACM 52 (7), 2009.
• with W. Kletti and U. Kubach: RFID in manufacturing . Springer, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-540-76453-3 .
• with S. Spiekermann: RFID and the Perception of Control: The Consumer's View . In: Communications of the ACM 48 (9): 73-76, 2005.
• with B. Berendt and S. Spiekermann: Privacy in E-Commerce: Stated Preferences vs. Actual Behavior . In: Communications of the ACM 48 (4): 101-106, 2005.
• with V. Gaede: Multidimensional Access Methods . ACM Computing Surveys 30 (2), 1998.
• Environmental information systems . Springer, Berlin 1998. ISBN 3-540-60926-1 .
• as editor: Environmental applications of geographic information systems . Wichmann, Karlsruhe 1992. ISBN 3-87907-259-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Oliver Günther in the catalog of the German National Library
• Vita on the website of the University of Potsdam
• List of publications (PDF; 216 kB)
• List of doctoral and post-doctoral candidates (PDF; 57 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Press release of the University of Potsdam: New President at the University of Potsdam ( Memento of November 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) of September 28, 2011, accessed on September 29, 2011.
2. ↑ acatech people. Retrieved January 26, 2018 .