Professor Raimund Seidel will take on the role of Scientific Director of Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics on May 1, 2014, as successor to founding Director Professor Reinhard Wilhelm.
Professor Seidel is an internationally renowned scientist. His interests focus mainly on modeling and analyzing algorithms and data structures, especially in the context of geometric problems, using randomization. He has made significant contributions to the success of informatics research in Saarbrücken within the context of the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Research Foundation. Among other achievements, he is the founding spokesperson of the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science. Professor Seidel will take over the position of Scientific Director of the Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics as successor to the center's founding director, Professor Reinhard Wilhelm, on May 1, 2014.
Over the last 24 years, Professor Wilhelm has left his personal imprint on the Dagstuhl concept. Under his direction the center, which was founded in 1990, swiftly evolved into an internationally renowned venue for computer science research, attracting and inspiring scientists from all over the world. Only outstanding researchers are invited to visit the seclusion of Schloss Dagstuhl, located in northern Saarland. The groups that meet at the center are small, carefully selected and interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word. Here scientists find the perfect spot for concentrated reflection and constructive conversation.
For his contributions as the center's Scientific Director, Professor Wilhelm received a number of national as well as international awards including the Distinguished Service Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest computer science association. The scientific work of Schloss Dagstuhl comprises not only the seminar program but also the operation of dblp, the renowned international literature database for computer science, and OpenAccess publishing services.
Professor Seidel has been closely connected to the informatics center at Schloss Dagstuhl since its earliest days. As a member of the Scientific Directorate, he has already helped to shape Dagstuhl's scientific program for many years. “As a regular participant in scientific seminars and as speaker at Dagstuhl events such as the science journalism workshop and advanced teacher training, I have been familiar with the special Dagstuhl concept for a long time. I’m looking forward to continuing the great work of Reinhard Wilhelm,” Professor Seidel comments.
Raimund Seidel studied mathematics and computer science in Austria, Canada, and the United States. After receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1986, he worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center and accepted a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley only one year later. In 1994, he found his way back to Europe where he accepted a chair at Saarland University. “I have never regretted my decision to leave California in order to come to the Saarland, in view of the brilliant development of informatics in Saarbrücken. I’m looking forward to the challenge of further developing the already very successful Dagstuhl concept,” Professor Seidel states.
