Founding Executive Board

Portrait Prof. Hans Jürgen Prömel

„Being the Founding President of the UTN is a magnificent, yet also challenging task. To be able to establish a Technical University based on modern scientific principles and on contemporary societal needs is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.“

– Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Hans Jürgen Prömel

Founding President

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Hans Jürgen Prömel has assumed office as Founding President of the tenth state-run university in Bavaria on March 1st, 2021.

From 2007 to 2019, Prof. Prömel held the office of President of the Technical University Darmstadt.

Born in Bienen (now Rees) in Northrhine-Westphalia in 1953, he studied mathematics and economics at the University of Bielefeld and completed his doctorate in mathematics. Following placements in Los Angeles and Bonn, where he held a professorship of discrete mathematics, he took up a professorship of theoretical computer science at the Humboldt University in Berlin. For seven years, he was full-time Vice President for Research there, starting in 2000. Prof. Prömel was also President of the TU9 and spokesman of the Council of Technical Universities in Germany in the German Rectors’ Conference.

„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.

„I have always followed the establishment of UTN with interest. After all, the founding of a new university strengthens the scientific area of the entire metropolitan region. For that reason, I am very happy to contribute my knowledge and experience to this unique project.“

– Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin

Founding Vice President for Research, Innovation und Entrepreneurship

On April 1, 2023, Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin completed the Founding Presidium as Founding Vice President for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

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.

„In the last few years I was committed to developing and improving individual aspects of a university. Now there is the chance to create a complete technical university from scratch. A fascinating task – and a great challenge!”

– Dr. Markus Zanner

Kanzler

Dr. Markus Zanner has assumed office as Kanzler of the tenth state-run university in Bavaria on January 1st, 2021.

From 2011 onwards, Dr. Zanner was Kanzler of the University of Bayreuth where he was also entrusted with establishing the new campus in Kulmbach. Before that, he held various responsible positions in science management at the Technical University of Munich, for example Head of the Department for the Promotion of Research, and Managing Director of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study.

Markus Zanner was born in Weiden in 1967. He studied history, religious science and romance studies at the University of Regensburg and spent one year of his studies at the Universidad Nacional de Misiones in Argentina, where he enrolled in history and anthropology. He completed his graduation as Dr. phil. at the University of Regensburg in 2000.

Contacts

Prof. Dr. Hans Jürgen Prömel
Founding President
president@utn.de
+499119274-1000 

Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke
Founding Vice President
for Academic and International Affairs
vp-learning@utn.de
+499119274-1200

Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin
Founding Vice President for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
vp-research@utn.de
+499119274-1400

Dr. Markus Zanner
Kanzler
kanzler@utn.de
+499119274-1100