On December 14, 2016, the Academic Senate of the University of Bremen re-elected the incumbent President, Professor Bernd Scholz-Reiter, for a further five-year term. “I thank the Academic Senate for the trust put in me and I’m looking forward to my second term as President of our fine University”, said Bernd Scholz-Reiter. “The University has developed amazingly. In the years to come, we must continue down the same ambitious road.” The University President’s current term of office ends on August 31, 2017.
He went on to say: “Our implementation of the University’s Institutional Strategy in the frame of the Excellence Initiative and the subsequent additional funding this brought with it has enabled us to position the University even better than before. In a parallel development, we have also scored a number of successes in the area of education. The recent accreditation of our quality assurance system underlines the success of our quality management and increases the University’s autonomy.” Scholz-Reiter said that in his second term of office he wishes to put a strong emphasis on expanding the University’s ongoing success both in research as well as in education. An important aspect in this respect will be the University’s application in the forthcoming round of the Excellence Strategy launched by the German Government and the federal states, the successor program to the Excellence Initiative. The President also sees an important task in providing reliable career paths for the University’s young researchers. In the near future he intends to implement a recently developed concept in this regard. Other important challenges going forward include the further development of research-based learning, the internationalization of study programs, and digitalization in teaching and studies.
Turning to the University’s problems, Bernd Scholz-Reiter said, “It is essential for the University of Bremen to have a solid financial basis to work on”. The University’s basic financing is anchored in Bremen’s Science Plan up to the year 2020. Nevertheless, according to the Federal Office of Statistics, when it comes to financing per student, a comparison of the basic funding of universities in Germany‘s 16 Bundesländer puts Bremen on place 14 – and per professor, on place 16. Therefore, during his second term, he says, the acquisition of second- third-party funding remains an important item on the agenda, as well as intensive lobbying to ensure the next science plan provides for stable and adequate financing.
A career history
Professor Dr.-Ing. Bernd Scholz-Reiter was appointed to the University of Bremen’s highest post in 2012. He has been a professor in the Faculty of Production Engineering since 2000. Prior to his appointment as (now) President he led the area “Planning and Control of Production Systems”. In 2002 he assumed the leadership of the Bremen Institute for Production and Logistics (BIBA), where he was also responsible for the area “Intelligent Production and Logistics Systems”. He was initiator and spokesperson for the DFG Collaborative Research Center “Autonomous Logistics Processes – A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations”. From 2007 till the end of 2011, Bernd Scholz-Reiter was Vice President of the German Research Foundation. Moreover, he is a full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Humanities as well as the National Academy of Science and Engineering – acatech. He is also a Fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP).
