On October 1, 2024, Professor Jan S. Hesthaven will take office as President of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The first term of office of the 58-year-old Dane will focus on a clearer positioning of KIT within the national and international science community. Central issues will be the close interplay of research, academic education, knowledge transfer and engagement with society, attracting international talent and close collaboration with strong partners worldwide.
“KIT is an institution with an enormous potential both nationally and internationally. It is my clear goal to enhance its strengths, make KIT more visible, and fully utilize the numerous areas of exceptional strength,” says the designated President of KIT, Professor Jan S. Hesthaven. “KIT has already achieved a lot, but has the potential for a lot more. Together with the researchers, employees, students, and my colleagues in the Executive Board, I will continue to shape KIT. I am very much looking forward to this.”
“I am very pleased that with Professor Jan S. Hesthaven we have been able to recruit an internationally recognized and renowned scientist to head KIT. Now, we have to continue KIT's success story and tackle the upcoming tasks and challenges with full power. For this, I wish him good luck,“ says Baden-Württemberg Minister for Science, Research, and the Arts Petra Olschowski.
“I am convinced that President Professor Hesthaven will successfully lead KIT into the future. His vast expertise and his vision for KIT make him the ideal person to further shape this unique institution and to advance KIT’s positioning in the international science community,” says Professor Michael Kaschke, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of KIT. “For his coming into office I wish him the very best.”
“With Professor Hesthaven taking office, KIT’s Executive Board will be complete again after a transitional period of just over a year,” says Professor Oliver Kraft, Vice President Research of KIT, who has been Acting President during the transition period. “I am very pleased that we will be able to tackle the upcoming challenges together – such as the upcoming reviews for the excellence strategy and program-oriented funding within the Helmholtz Association at the beginning of 2025. ”
“I look forward to cooperating with Jan S. Hesthaven. His vast international expertise, outstanding scientific know-how, and strategic intuition will not only advance research and academic education at KIT, but also enrich the exchange of ideas within the Helmholtz Association,” says Professor Otmar Wiestler, President of the Helmholtz Association. ”With him, we win an acknowledged expert for the transfer of information sciences to industry and society. For instance, Hesthaven developed new computation methods and algorithms for machine learning, for supercomputers, and for complex simulations. These are valuable instruments to jointly address the challenges of our time.”
Strong Partnerships in Germany and Worldwide
Hesthaven emphasizes that research and academic education are poised to change substantially in the years to come, not least as a result of the opportunities and challenges associated with Artificial Intelligence. It is now time to discuss how this can be handled by KIT as an institution. To have an impact and to keep up with the best international institutions, KIT needs strong partners: “I believe much more in collaboration than in competition. We will need reliable and complementary partners in the region, in Germany and worldwide, with whom we can collaborate in our core areas of research, academic education, innovation, and transfer as well as engagement with society,” Hesthaven points out.
Science to Benefit Society
He emphasizes that it will be important to never lose sight of the ultimate goal: “Science and technology must eventually seek to impact and improve society by which it is financed. In research, we do this by developing solutions for societal challenges. However, education is equally important: It is a core part of our mission to educate young people as the future workforce to help address current and future challenges. The success of this combined mission is our contract with society.”
Attracting Talent from All Walks of Life
Overall, KIT needs to open up internationally, Hesthaven points out. To achieve this, it is essential to attract talent from all over the world. In terms of diversity, however, socio-economic diversity needs to be taken into account as well. “We cannot afford losing young talented and committed people, who decide against studies at a university because it makes them feel like strangers in a strange land,” Hesthaven says.
Central Role within the Helmholtz Association
KIT should take a central part as The Research University in the Helmholtz Association, emphasizes Hesthaven. “The unique strength of a university is that it, in contrast to a research center, can undertake very-high-risk research and occasionally fail while still fulfilling its educational mission, effectively hedging the risk with the educational mission. This opens up unique opportunities for closer collaboration with the research centers in the Helmholtz Association, which in turn provides exciting options for our students. We need to make optimal use of our resources across the Helmholtz Association to collaborate more closely across disciplines in research and education to enable the transition from fundamental research to applied research at realistic levels of complexity to provide solutions to societal challenges.”
Hesthaven, the new President of KIT, will succeed Professor Holger Hanselka, who moved to Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in August 2023. In January 2024, KIT’s Supervisory Board elected Hesthaven President. In February, his election was confirmed by the KIT Senate. During the transition period, Professor Oliver Kraft, Vice President Research of KIT, has been Acting President. (mle)
About the Person
Professor Jan S. Hesthaven, born in 1965, has been Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) since 2021. His scope of responsibility included strong integration of research and academic education, all appointment and promotion procedures, as well as close cooperation with the President of EPFL on the university’s strategic orientation. Since 2013, Hesthaven had been Professor of Mathematics of EPFL. Before, in 1995, he was a faculty member at Brown University, one of the oldest and most renowned universities in the USA, where he was Founding Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization (2006 to 2013) and co-founder of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics. Hesthaven studied Computational Physics and earned his doctorate at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen. Hesthaven is Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the American Mathematical Society, and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He also is member of the European Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea. In May 2024, the Technical University of Denmark awarded Hesthaven an honorary doctorate.
More Information:
“I Believe much more in Collaboration than in Competition” – Interview with Professor Jan S. Hesthaven in the research magazine lookKIT
KIT Press Release “Supervisory Board Elects Jan S. Hesthaven President of KIT“ (January 23, 2024)
KIT Release “KIT Senate Confirms Election of Jan S. Hesthaven“ (February 19, 2024)
Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 10,000 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,800 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.