2018
Prof. Dr. Kristina Klein
Faculty 7 – Business Studies & Economics
In October 2018, Kristina Klein took up the professorship for business administration, in particular marketing and consumer behavior, in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Bremen. Her research focuses on gamification, i.e. the use of game elements such as trophies, points, and leaderboards in a nongame context, such as a company’s marketing activities, serious games, and sensory marketing. The latter includes the influence of experience through the five senses on consumer attitudes and behavior. Kristina Klein is not only anchored in the Rhineland because of her past as a “Funkenmariechen” (dancing girls as part of Carnival festivities), she also studied business administration, with stays in Norway and Canada, and earned her doctorate at the University of Cologne. Her dissertation won the academic prize of the German marketing association (Deutscher Marketing Verband) in 2013. Klein is part of the “Digitalization” research group in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Bremen; in this group, the design and use of chat bots will be an essential part of their empirical-quantitative experimental research. In addition, the study of the effects of fragrances and sounds on consumers remains an important focus of her work. Together with Professor Maik Eisenbeiß and Professor Christoph Burmann, she is a cofounder of the markstones Institute of Marketing, Branding and Technology at the University of Bremen.
Prof. Dr. Alexander Cvetko
Faculty 9 – Cultural Studies
Since October 2018, Alexander Cvetko has been professor of music education at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Musikpädagogik (Institute of Musicology and Music Education) at the University of Bremen. Born in Berlin, he studied music and history at Osnabrück University as a secondary school teacher. There, he earned his doctorate in interdisciplinary fields including history, music, and education. After his teacher training in Stade and Buxtehude, he was a student adviser at a secondary school in Hesse with a focus on music. After several years working at the school, he was offered an adjunct position at the University of Siegen, where he earned his university teaching qualification with “telling stories as a method in music education” in the form of historical and empirical studies. Before his appointment to the University of Bremen, he was a professor at the Trossingen University of Music for five years and lived in Constance on Lake Constance. In addition to research and teaching, his central activities were the management and development of degree courses as well as international networking in the Lake Constance region. His journey has now led him back to the university, where he hopes to further develop his research projects. Among other things, there are plans to establish a center for historical music education – which does not yet exist in Germany – in cooperation with the universities in Bamberg and Siegen.
Prof. Dr. Olivia Masseck
Faculty 2 – Biology and Chemistry
In October 2018, Olivia Masseck was appointed by the University of Bremen to professor of synthetic biology in the Faculty of Biology and Chemistry. Following her studies in biology and mathematics, she received a doctorate in neuroscience from the International Graduate School of Neuroscience at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. After a research stay at the laboratory of neurobiology of sensorimotor networks (“Laboratoire de Neurobiologie des Reseaux Sensorimoteurs”) at Université Paris Descartes (France), she worked as a research assistant and working group leader at the Department of General Zoology and Neurobiology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, which was one of the first research groups worldwide to establish optogenetic methods. From 2016 to 2018, she held the junior professorship for high-resolution fluorescence microscopy at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of anxiety and depression. The focus here is on the neurotransmitter serotonin in particular. In Bremen, she is now working on setting up a working group that will use modern methods such as optogenetics to investigate the serotonergic system.
Prof. Dr. Christian Kandler
Faculty 11 – Human and Health Sciences
Since October 2018, Christian Kandler has been the second newly appointed professor to strengthen the Institute of Psychology – which was also newly founded in October – in the Faculty of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Bremen. He studied psychology from 2002 to 2007 at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. From 2007 to 2017, he researched and taught on the subject of genetic and experiential causes of interindividual personality differences and development at Bielefeld University, where he received his doctorate in 2010 and his university teaching qualification in 2017. Since October 2015, he has been the head of the DFG-funded longitudinal project Study of Personality Architecture and Dynamics, which aims to adequately describe and explain the uniqueness of people against the background of a broad personality concept. He won the Early Career Development Award of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences in 2013 and the Early Achievement Award of the European Association of Personality Psychology in 2018. From 2017 to 2018, Kandler was a professor of differential and personality psychology at the Medical School Berlin, before accepting a professorship in personality psychology and psychological diagnostics from the University of Bremen.
Prof. Dr. Lauri Wessel
Faculty 7 – Business Studies & Economics
Since October 1, 2018, Lauri Wessel has been professor of business administration, in particular management and organization, in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Bremen. He studied business administration at the Freie Universität Berlin until 2008, received his doctorate there in 2013, and was appointed junior professor for business administration – in particular business information systems, information, and organization – in 2014. This was accompanied by the leadership of the junior research group for Health IT and Business Model Innovation, which was funded by the Excellence Initiative II. His field of work is dedicated to the management and organization of the digital transformation of the health care system. The focus is on the effects on social and organizational practices of intelligent technologies such as computer systems that can be worn on the body, such as smartwatches or fitness trackers. These changes are investigated as part of the research focus areas “shaping health services through digital innovations and smart services” and “digital transformation of health organizations.” In the two areas, both basic research and close cooperation with the practical world are important cornerstones of his research group.
Prof. Dr. Yannis Theocharis
Faculty 9 – Cultural Studies
Professor Yannis Theocharis will be professor of media and communication with a focus on innovative methods at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen beginning on October 1, 2018. The newly created professorship focuses on the rapid changes in the political information environment. In particular, Theocharis will examine the opportunities and challenges of social media for democratic engagement and public discourse. The “Computational Communication and Democracy” lab, which he founded, focuses on the research and teaching of computational methods for understanding the democratic challenges of digital media, such as the spread of incivility and troll behavior in communication between citizens and political players. Theocharis holds a Bachelor of Science degree in sociology from the University of Crete (Greece), a master’s degree in new media from the London School of Economics (United Kingdom) and a PhD in political science from University College London (United Kingdom). From 2011 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a senior research fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research at the University of Mannheim, as well as assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Prof. Dr. Elena Zanichelli
Faculty 9 – Cultural Studies
In October 2018, Elena Zanichelli took over the junior professorship for art studies and aesthetic theory at the Institute for Art History – Film Studies – Art Education in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen. She is also a member of the Mariann Steegmann Institut – Kunst & Gender and of the research field “wohnen+/–ausstellen.” Born in Italy, she studied art history and preservation of the cultural heritage at the University of Parma (Italy). In 2012, she earned her doctorate with a dissertation titled “Privat – bitte eintreten! Rhetoriken des Privaten in der Kunst der 1990er Jahre” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she was a research assistant in the department of modern art history from 2008 to 2010. Since then, Zanichelli has taught at various academies and higher education institutions (HEI), in the 2015/16 winter semester as a Mariann Steegmann visiting professor at the University of Bremen. She has also participated in various exhibitions, including documenta 12. Her current research project takes the current change from “normal” to “selected,” but also “world family,” i.e. the change to a “postfamily family,” as an opportunity to analyze visual (re-)articulations of Western family representations since the 19th century in art and media in a comparative way. Within the framework of her professorship, Zanichelli would like to continue her interdisciplinary and intermedial focus and intensify it in exchange with local and (inter-)national art institutions.
Prof. Dr. Stephan Frickenhaus
Faculty 3 – Mathematics/Computer Science
Professor Stephan Frickenhaus from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has taken over the cooperative professorship for technical mathematics in earth system sciences in the Faculty of Mathematics/Computer Science at the University of Bremen. Professor Frickenhaus studied physics at TU Dortmund University with a focus on theoretical high-energy physics. After completing his doctorate in biophysics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 1999, he moved to the AWI in Bremerhaven. Coupled to a cooperative professorship with the University of Applied Sciences Bremerhaven, he helped develop the master’s degree course in bioanalytics in 2004/2005 and established a corresponding group at the AWI. In the overarching topic of data science, he is involved in networking universities and research institutes. With the appointment to the cooperative professorship, Stephan Frickenhaus takes over teaching and research activities at the Zentrum für Technomathematik (ZeTeM). He also manages the computer center at the AWI. As part of the Bremen Supercomputing Competence Center (BremHLR) cooperation, he represents the AWI and the State of Bremen in the technical commission of the North-German High Supercomputing Alliance (Norddeutscher Verbund zur Förderung des Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnens – HLRN).
Prof. Dr. Martin Nonhoff
Faculty 8 – Social Sciences
Martin Nonhoff has been a professor of political theory at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences since April 2018. After studying political science, modern/contemporary history, and economics, he became a research assistant at Friedrich-Alexander Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1999. In 2003, he moved to the Center for Social Policy Research at the University of Bremen. He received his doctorate in 2005 with a dissertation on the subject of political discourse and hegemony: the project of the social market economy. From 2007 to 2012, he worked – with interruptions – at the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “Transformations of the State” at the University of Bremen. After holding various deputy professorships, he held a junior professorship in political theory at the University of Bremen from 2012 to 2018. In 2016, he spent one semester at Cornell University as a research fellow. His research focuses on contemporary political theory, especially democratic theory, the history of political ideas, and political discourse research.
Prof. Dr. Jörn Reinhardt
Faculty 6 – Law
Jörn Reinhardt has been a professor of public law in the Faculty of Law since the 2018 summer semester. He studied law and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and in Essex, England. After the first and second legal state examinations in Berlin and his dissertation in 2007, he first worked at the constitutional court of Brandenburg, then at the Universität Hamburg, where he also became qualified to teach at the university level. In 2012, he was a DAAD scholarship recipient at Institut Michel Villey (Paris, France) and, from 2011 to 2016, a fellow of the support program for young academics of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. His research focuses on public law, the fundamentals of law, and the law of the information society, in particular the theory and dogmatics of basic communication rights, legal issues related to media change in the democratic public sphere, knowledge, and politics.
Prof. Dr. Simone Scherger
Faculty 8 - Social Sciences
In April, Simone Scherger took up the endowed professorship for life-course-oriented social policy at the SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen. For the first five years, the professorship is financed by the funding network for interdisciplinary social policy research (FIS – Fördernetzwerk Interdisziplinäre Sozialpolitikforschung), which is supported by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. As part of the professorship, Simone Scherger will deal with the connections between sociopolitical regulations and individual life courses. An important example of this is the question of how pension reforms affect the transition to retirement and the propensity to work in old age. Conversely, she also deals with the challenges faced by social security systems due to changing employment patterns or pluralized family models. Recently, Simone Scherger was also appointed to the German government’s pension commission. After studying sociology in Bonn and Brussels, Scherger earned her doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin in 2007 with a thesis on changing the timing of important transitions in life. Following research activities at the University of Manchester in England, from 2010 to 2017 she headed the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Gainful Employment Beyond the Pension Limit in Germany and Great Britain” funded by the German Research Foundation, which was based at SOCIUM. In 2016–17, she also filled in for the W3 professorship for sociology with a focus on gender studies at the University of Konstanz.
Prof. Dr. Marco F. H. Schmidt
Faculty 11 - Human and Health Sciences
Since April 1, Marco F. H. Schmidt has been Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology in the Faculty of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Bremen. He holds a Master of Science degree in neurocognitive psychology from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich and, at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, he conducted research on the understanding of fairness in early childhood. With the support of the Studienstiftung (German Academic Scholarship Foundation), he then earned his doctorate from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. After a postdoctoral position at the MPI in Leipzig, Schmidt took over the management of an international group of young researchers at the LMU Munich in 2015, which was funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria. His new research group at the University of Bremen is investigating social-cognitive development in early childhood with a focus on the developmental psychological foundations of human normativity, morality, and cooperation. Schmidt’s research areas are interdisciplinary and lie at the junction of the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.
Prof. Dr. Yan Ananda Suarsana
Faculty 9 - Cultural Studies
Since April, Professor Yan Ananda Suarsana has been supporting the Institute for Religious Studies and Religious Education at the University of Bremen. He studied theology and German language and literature, as well as classical philology and classical Indology, at Heidelberg University. Beginning in 2008, he worked as a scientific assistant in the department of reformation history and modern church history at the Faculty of Theology there. After his teacher training, he worked from 2014 to 2018 as an assistant and project collaborator in the department of religious studies and intercultural theology. From there, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Bremen. Suarsana’s work covers the global history of Christianity. He is particularly interested in the ways in which the Christian religion was interwoven with other religious currents of the colonial era, which had a decisive influence on the concept of world religion. His work focuses primarily on the history of the early Pentecostal movement as part of a worldwide spiritual revival and the analysis of the Christian confrontation with non-Christian religions beginning in the second half of the 19th century, with the help of postcolonial theory.
Prof. Dr. Sven Kerzenmacher
Faculty 4 - Production Engineering
On April 1, 2018, Professor Sven Kerzenmacher took over as Head of the Department of Environmental Process Engineering at the University of Bremen. Kerzenmacher studied process and environmental engineering and energy conversion and management at the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences. In 2010, he received his doctorate from the Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK) at the University of Freiburg with a distinction in the field of implantable glucose fuel cells. Since April 2008, Kerzenmacher has headed the working group for bioelectrochemical systems in Freiburg. He has already been awarded several prizes for his research, including the DECHEMA prize for up-and-coming teachers in higher education (2016), the advancement award of the Forum Angewandte Mikrosystemtechnik e.V. (2011), and the GMM prize of the VDE/VDI-Gesellschaft Mikroelektronik, Mikro- und Feinwerktechnik (2009). Professor Kerzenmacher’s field of work comprises interdisciplinary research into the foundations, materials, and processes of sustainable environmental technology and biotechnology. The focus is on new technologies for wastewater treatment and the synthesis of recyclable materials with microbial fuel and electrolysis cells as well as membrane processes. In terms of materials science, the research group develops electrospun nanofiber structures that serve as carriers for microbial catalysts, for example. Further focal points include the investigation of mass transfer processes and methodical work on applied (bio-)electrochemistry.
Prof. Dr. Anke Pohl
Faculty 3 - Mathematics/Computer Science
Anke Pohl took up a professorship in Analysis in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Bremen on April 1. After studying mathematics at Clausthal University of Technology and the University of Bologna in Italy, she earned her doctorate from Paderborn University. What followed were several years of research and teaching at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, ETH Zurich, and the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where she became a professor in 2016 with a thesis on dynamic systems and automorphic functions in mathematics. Also in 2016, she was appointed professor at Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) Jena. Her research focuses on mathematical quantum chaos, ergodic theory and dynamic systems, harmonic analysis, and analytical number theory. Anke Pohl is particularly interested in the mutual relationships between these areas and the application of her methods to questions from other areas.
Prof. Dr. Johanna Myrzik
Faculty 1 – Physics/Electrical Engineering
On March 1, 2018, Johanna Myrzik received her appointment as Professor of Automation Technology in the Faculty of Physics / Electrical Engineering at the University of Bremen. Her specialty lies in the automation of future energy networks with a high proportion of renewable energy sources. After studying for her Diplom in electrical engineering at the TU Darmstadt, she was awarded her doctorate at the University of Kassel. This was followed by 9 years as a researcher in the Netherlands. At the TU Eindhoven (Netherlands), she was as associate professor responsible for the research fields of decentralized and urban energy supply, power electronics and power quality. In 2009 she was appointed Professor of Energy Efficiency at the TU Dortmund, and in 2011 she became Deputy Head of the Institute for Energy Systems, Energy Efficiency and Energy Economics in Dortmund. Future energy networks require a hybrid multi-sectoral structure that not only has to adapt dynamically to technical requirements and needs, but is also strongly influenced by digitalization and societal change. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in energy networks will therefore be at the center of her research and teaching activities at the University of Bremen.
Prof. Dr. Vera Hagemann
Faculty 7 – Business Studies and Economics
Vera Hagemann took up the Chair of Human Resources in the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics on March 1, 2018. After completing her psychology studies with a focus on occupational and organizational psychology at the University of Trier, training as a behavioral trainer, and a stay abroad as an in-house consultant in Bangkok, Prof. Hagemann worked at the Chair for Organizational Psychology at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and in the field of organizational and business psychology in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where she earned her doctorate in psychology in 2011. In 2015 she moved to the Ruhr-University Bochum in the research unit for labor, organization and business psychology. At the same time, in 2014 and 2015 she was a Visiting Professor in the department Human Resources, Leadership and Organization at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Austria). Hagemann brings to the University of Bremen her research focus on high responsibility teams and their further training opportunities, as well as requirement analysis, feedback, debriefing and analysis of the changing work and design options of work caused by digitalization.
Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
Faculty 9 – Cultural Studies
In January 2018, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler was appointed to a professorship at the Institut für Religionswissenschaft und Religionspädagogik [Institute for Religious Education and Study of Religions] in Faculty 9, Cultural Studies. Her research interests are mediatization and religion, recent Catholicism in Germany and the Philippines, religion and video gaming as well as the theory of ritual. After studying Protestant theology in Bielefeld and Heidelberg, she earned her doctorate in religious studies at the University of Heidelberg. She wrote her dissertation on “Ritual Design in the World Wide Web” while working in the Collaborative Research Center “Ritual Dynamics” in the project “Between Online-Religion and Religion-Online: Constellations for Ritual Transfer in the Medium Internet”. In 2008 she moved to the Institute for Religious Education and Study of Religions at the University of Bremen as a research associate, where she later became a junior professor in 2012. Radde-Antweiler leads the “Religion and Media” lab at the University of Bremen’s Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) and part of the research group “Communicative Figurations in Times of Deep Mediatization.” She is editor of the online journal GAMEVIRONMENTS.