The University Council guides the university, takes on responsibility for strategic considerations and decides on plans for structure and development at the university. It also proposes measures that serve to enhance the university’s profile and further develop the university’s performance and competitive capacities. The University Council also supervises the management of the Rectorate.
Dr Henrike Hartmann has been the deputy secretary general of the Volkswagen Foundation and head of the funding department since 2015. She studied pharmacy at the University of Freiburg and earned her doctorate in pharmacology at Heidelberg University and the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim. As an academic staff member, she researched Alzheimer’s at the University of Florida, Gainsville in 1993, worked at the Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston from 1995-1997 and joined the Goethe University Frankfurt afterwards.
Since 1998, she has been a member of the foundation, starting off as a funding coordinator in the area of biomedicine and life sciences, where she was responsible for numerous funding initiatives. Since 2010, she has been the director of funding early career researchers as well as of structural higher education development. In addition to her work in our University Council, Henrike Hartmann is a member of the board of trustees of several Max Planck Institutes, as well as of the University of Frankfurt.
Carsten Könneker studied literature, philosophy and art history (M.A.) as well as physics (Dipl.) at the RWTH Aachen, the University of Clermont Auvergne, Washington University (Saint Louis) and the University of Cologne. He completed his doctorate there in 2000 on the literary, aesthetic and political reception of relativity theory and quantum mechanics during the Weimar Republic.
From 2000 to 2019 he worked for Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Heidelberg), from 2004 as editor-in-chief of the magazine Gehirn&Geist and from 2010 as publishing editor-in-chief for the entire Spektrum magazine family and the portal Spektrum.de.
In 2012, he was appointed to the Chair (W3) of Science Communication and Science Research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he played a key role in developing the Science - Media - Communication degree programme until 2018. From 2012 to 2015, he also built up the National Institute for Science Communication (NaWik) as founding director. From 2019 to 2022, he was Managing Director of the Klaus Tschira Foundation (Heidelberg). Since 2020, he has been a board member of the HITS Foundation (Heidelberg).
Carsten Könneker is Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Higher Education Development CHE (Gütersloh) and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Science Media Center Germany (Cologne). He is a member of the supervisory board of NaWik (Karlsruhe), the advisory board of Forum Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim), the scientific advisory board of Forum Wissen (Göttingen), the board of trustees of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Heidelberg) and the jury of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Prize for Science Journalism.
Ina Schlie studied economics at the University of Heidelberg. She is an expert in digital transformation, innovation, M&A and finance. After her studies, she started her career at KPMG in the Audit and Tax department, moved to SAP in 1997, where she held various management positions, including Senior Vice President Global Tax (2009 - 2016). From 2017 to 2019, she was responsible for public sector relations in the role of Senior Vice President Digital Government and Head of Government Relations.
Ina Schlie is a member of the supervisory boards of q.beyond AG, CMBlu Energy AG and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, where she is the chair of the audit committee and a member of the strategy committee. She is also a lecturer at the Faculty of Business Administration at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Furthermore, she is involved as an investor and business angel in various start-ups. She is co-chair of the encourageventures association, whose foundation she initiated in 2021.
Dorothea Wagner has been a computer science professor at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) since 2003. From 1976 to 1983 she studied mathematics and computer science at RWTH Aachen, where she received her doctorate in 1986. After her habilitation in 1992 at the TU Berlin, she held a chair in computer science at the University of Konstanz from 1994 to 2003. Her research focuses on algorithms for complex networks, with an interest in developing theoretically sound yet practical algorithms for important application areas.
Dorothea Wagner is a member of the Academia Europaea, the German Academy of Science and Engineering - acatech and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She has received several honours for her research. In 2019, she was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal for her services to computer science, and in 2022, TU Dortmund University awarded her an honorary doctorate. Dorothea Wagner was and is a member of several scientific committees. She was Vice-President of the DFG from 2007 to 2014 and a member of the German Science and Humanities Council (WR) from 2015 to 2023, of which she was Chair from 2020 to 2023.
Michael Zürn has been Director of the “Global Governance” research unit at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Professor of International Relations at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2004. From 2004-2009 he was the founding rector of the Hertie School of Governance, also in Berlin. Prior to this, he was Professor of International Relations and Director of the Institut für Interkulturelle und Internationale Studien (InIIS) at the University of Bremen. From 2002 until 2004, he led the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) “Staatlichkeit im Wandel” at the University of Bremen. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Academia Europaea.
Among other topics, he has researched and published extensively on the emergence and function of inter- and supranational institutions as well as normative tensions and political conflicts that tend to arise in the wake of such developments. His most recent monograph “A Theory of Global Governance. Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation” was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
