Oliver Günther


Oliver Günther is president of the University of Potsdam and former president of the German Informatics Society

Career

In 1979 and 1980, Günther was the winner of Germany's National Mathematics Competition. He holds a Diplom in Industrial Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Before becoming assistant professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1988, Günther worked as a post-doc at the International Computer Science Institute. From 1989 till 1993 he held a leading position at .
From 1993 until 2011 Günther was Professor of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From 2006 until 2011 he also served as Dean of Humboldt's School of Business and Economics. He was elected president of the University of Potsdam effective 2012. In May 2014 he received an honorary doctorate from American Jewish University.

Professor Günther has conducted research projects in the areas of enterprise information systems, IT strategy, security and privacy, digital asset management, collaborative software, database management, as well as geographic and environmental information systems. He has published broadly on these subjects and has been associate editor of numerous academic journals.
He has held visiting faculty positions at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications and the Pôle universitaire Léonard-de-Vinci in Paris, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town.

Other activities

Günther has served as a consultant and board member to various government agencies and high-tech companies. He was chairman of the board of Poptel AG, Germany's first voice-over-IP company, and chief technology officer of Teamtoolz, Inc., a San Francisco-based cloud service provider for the marketing and advertising industry. Commissioned by the German Ministry of the Interior, he currently coordinates the foundation of a business process library for the German public administration.

Corporate boards