Christoph Meinel (Univ.-Prof., Dr.rer.nat., Dr.sc.nat., 1954) is founding president of the German University of Digital Science (i.Gr.) and was from 2004 to 2023 Managing and Scientific Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH (HPI). He is a full professor (C4) for Informatics at the university of Potsdam and has the chair for "Internet Technology and Systems" at the HPI. From 2017 to 2021 he was the founding dean of the Digital Engineering Faculty of the University of Potsdam.
The German University of Digital Science (i:Gr.) is designed as an innovative digital university where digitalization experts are trained fully digital. An MB degree course in "Digital Transformation", a Master's degree course in "Digital Leadership" and a Bachelor's degree course in "Digital World" will be started in 2024 and 2025 respectively. The range of courses is focused on prospective students who want/need to continue their education in the field of digital technologies and on prospective students from the Global South.
HPI is a university center of excellence for digital engineering, academically constituted as the faculty for digital engineering at the University of Potsdam. HPI is carried by the foundation of Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP, and offers excellent university Bachelor's, Master's and PhD programs in Digital Engineering as well as in Design Thinking. HPI's course offerings are also freely accessible via the online platforms tele-TASK and openHPI.de.
Together with Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel hosted the 1st National IT Summit of German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel at HPI in 2006and was head or member of various project groups in the national digital summit process,Since 2012 he is a member of acatech, the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. 2007-22 he was the chair of the German IPv6 Council, Together with Larry Leifer of the Stanford university, 2008-22 he shaped as program director the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is chairman resp. member of numerous scientific committees and supervisory boards, e.g. SAP Security Advisory Board, Board of Goveners of the Technion, open Humboldt expert group. He is engaged in various MINT initiatives to get pupils interested in digitale technologies. So he is member of the board of directors of the excellence network of German schools MINT EC and since 2022 chairman of the MINT initiative "MINT Zukunft schaffen".
His research interests are broadly diversified in the area of innovative Internet applications and systems, especially in digital education, e-learning & tele-teaching, artifical intelligence and deep learing, and Internet and information security. He is also active in the field of innovation research and investigates the Stanford innovation method design thinking. Former research interest were in telemedicine, as well as in the theoretical foundations of computer science in the areas of complexity theory and efficient OBDD-based algorithms and data structures.
Christoph Meinel teaches at HPI in the bachelor and master programs on digital engineering and in the HPI School of Design Thinking. He offers numerous open interactive online courses on the openHPI platform on Internet topics (e.g. 50 Years of the Internet) and cybersecurity (e.g. Crime Scene Internet) and supervises numerous PhD students. More then 70 of his doctorands have defended their PhD theses.He is also an honorary professor at the Technical University of Beijing and at Dalian University of Technology, a visiting professor at Shanghai University, a concurrent professor at Nanjing University, and was a senior research fellow at the interdisciplinary center SnT at the University of Luxembourg.
Here is a selection of his lectures in den areas:
which can be freely accessed as Tele-Lectures via the tele-task portal.
Christoph Meinel is the author or co-author of 35 books and several conference proceedings and has published more than 750 scientific papers in prestigious scientific journals and international conferences. Together with his team, he developed the first European MOOC platform openHPI.de, which now has over one million course enrollments and among others is also used by SAP (openSAP.com) and WHO (openWHO.org), altogether with more than 15 mio. course enrollments. In the years 2017-21, under his leadership a GPDR-conform school cloud was developed funded by the federal ministry of education BMBF, which is currently is used in over 4,000 schools across Germany. In addition, he was the founder and long-time editor of the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity ECCC, is the editor the HPI digital blog and has designed and runs various Internet services like ID-Leak-Checker or tele-TASK archive.
Christoph Meinel studied mathematics and computer science at the Humboldt University in Berlin from 1974 tp 1979 and received his doctorate (Dr.rer.nat.) there in 1981. From 1981 to 1991 he worked as a scientific assistant at the Humboldt University and at the Institute for Mathematics at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. In 1988 he habilitated (Dr.sc.nat.) with a thesis on complexity theory, which was published as a monograph (volume 370) in the series of Lecture Notes on Computer Science of the Springer-Verlag. After research stays at the University of Saarbrücken and a visiting professorship at the University of Paderborn, in 1992 he was appointed full professor (C4) of computer science at the University of Trier and holded the chair of "Theoretical Concepts and New Applications of Computer Science". In 1994 he founded ECCC - the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity and was its edotor in chief until 2016. In 1996, he was co-founder and director of the Trier branch of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM), which operated 1998-2002 as an independent Institute for Telematics under his leadership and management.
In 2004, he was appointed scientific director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, where he holds the chair (C4) for "Internet Technologies and Systems". From 1996 to 2007, Christoph Meinel was a member of the scientific directorate of IBFI Schloss Dagstuhl. From 1992 to 2007, he was spokesperson for the special interests group "Complexity" of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), since 20017 he is a GI Fellow. He participates in a variety of international program committees and has organized various international symposia and conferences. He was and is a member of varous advisory board, liike the Security Advisory Board of SAP SE. His internationally patented high-security solution "Lock Keeper" is licensed by Siemens AG. Also worth mentioning is the Tele-Board and Tele-Board-Med systems for creative support of spatially distributed designer teams and connect physicians and patients.
