Founding Executive Board of the University

“At the UTN, we have a unique opportunity to build a university for tackling the social and technical challenges of the future, supported with new structures for research, teaching, and transfer. Being able to co-shape and deliver such a vision as Founding President was and is most appealing to me. I am grateful to the entire UTN team, especially to the Deputy Founding President, Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin, for their commitment to this vision. Their passionate work has set a strong foundation on which to further develop the UTN during the next period of considerable growth and focus on artificial intelligence“

– Prof. Dr. Michael Huth

Founding President

Nuremberg. Prof. Dr. Michael Huth has taken office as the new Founding President of the Technical University of Nuremberg (UTN), with effect from October 1, 2024. He is taking over the presidential duties of Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin, the Founding Vice President for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, who has been in office as the Deputy Founding President since April 2024.

Prof. Huth is moving to the UTN from Imperial College London, one of the top 10 universities in the world. At Imperial, he was Professor of Computer Science, Head of the Department of Computing, and will continue to be a Visiting Professor. In research and teaching, his focus is on forward-looking topics in the areas of artificial intelligence and cyber security.

Michael Huth was born in Aschaffenburg in Lower Franconia and is now returning to Bavaria after more than 30 years at renowned universities in Great Britain and the USA. He studied mathematics at the TU Darmstadt and received his PhD at Tulane University, New Orleans. He then researched and taught, e.g., at the TU Darmstadt and Kansas State University, and spent a research sabbatical at the University of Oxford. He is co-founder & senior researcher at Xayn, an AI start-up based in Berlin.

„As Founding Vice President for Academic and International Affairs I will have the unique opportunity to integrate innovative, digitalized and evidence-based digital learning designs into a university right from the start and to permanently entrench it there. The concept of the University of Technology Nuremberg enables us to completely re-think digital learning experience design approaches in higher education.“

– Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke

Founding Vice President for Academic and International Affairs

Since January 1st, 2022, Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke has been Founding Vice President for Academic and International Affairs at the University of Technology Nuremberg. In addition, she has been granted professorship of Information Science & Learning Technologies.

Prof. Jahnke is a renowned expert in the field of digital learning. As Founding Vice President for Academic and International Affairs she will be responsible for incorporating digital teaching and learning at the University of Technology Nuremberg. For more than 15 years, she has studied digital learning and the implementation of modern technologies in teaching and learning. One of the core competences of Prof. Jahnke is to combine IT-related issues with educational science.

Prof. Jahnke completed her dissertation as Dr. phil. (Ph.D.) at TU Dortmund in 2005. From 2011 to 2015, she was Professor at the Department for Applied Educational Sciences at Umeå University in Sweden. From 2015 to 2021, she was Associate Professor at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies within the University of Missouri-Columbia in the United States, where she was also Director of the Information Experience Lab.

„Within the last three years, an excellent team has laid an outstanding scientific foundation, on which we will further develop the UTN with a stronger focus on artificial intelligence.“

– Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin

Founding Vice President for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

On April 1, 2023, Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin completed the Founding Presidium as Founding Vice President for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He is also Deputy Founding President of the UTN.

Alexander Martin studied business mathematics at the University of Augsburg and earned his doctorate and habilitation in mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin. After that, he was assistant head of the Optimization Department at the Konrad Zuse Institute in Berlin (ZIB). In 2000, he was appointed Professor at the Technical University Darmstadt where he was Vice President from 2008 – 2010. Most recently, he became Head of the Chair of Analytics & Mixed-Integer Optimization at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. As of 2019, he is one of three Institute Directors of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, where he represents, among other things, the topics of data analytics and artificial intelligence as part of the ADA Lovelace Center. He has participated in different initiatives of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is involved in several collaborative projects of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection. He is also co-editor of several international journals.

In addition, Prof. Martin is a member of the Senate and Grants Committee for Research of the DFG for graduate programs and Chairman of the Board of the Society for Operations Research.

„Precisely because in my former municipal role I was able to accompany the founding and development of UTN from the very beginning, it is all the more appealing to now serve here as Vice President for Administration. My responsibilities include, among other things, overseeing staff growth, construction projects, as well as the establishment and further development of structures. I look forward to working on these tasks together with UTN’s strong team!“

– Dr. Michael Fraas

Vice President for Administration

Dr. Michael Fraas has been Vice President for Administration of UTN since September 1, 2025. Since 2023, he has held the professorship for Business Law and Transfer at Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm. From 2011 to 2023, he served as a full-time city councillor as well as the representative for economic and science affairs to the city of Nuremberg.

His professional career previously took him to Berlin to the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology and into the private sector – including positions at Taylor Wessing law firm and Ernst & Young. Fraas was born in 1968, studied law at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Lausanne, and Passau, and earned his doctorate at the University of Passau in 1998. After completing his legal clerkship in the Higher Regional Court district of Munich, he passed the second state examination in law.