Steering committee of the Fraunhofer Academy

The Fraunhofer Academy's steering committee is made up of representatives of the Fraunhofer Institutes and decides on the acceptance of new continuing education programs and partner institutes. In addition, the directorate advises the management of the administrative office and the speaker of the directorate represents the interests of the Fraunhofer Academy externally.

Prof. Dr. Görge Deerberg

Spokesman of the steering committee

Prof. Dr. Görge Deerberg is the deputy director and head of research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, where he heads up the process technology business unit. He is also the head of the interdisciplinary distance learning program for environmental sciences “infernum”, which Fraunhofer UMSICHT offers in cooperation with the FernUniversität in Hagen. After studying chemical engineering at the University of Dortmund, he obtained his doctorate in 1996 with a thesis on “The evaluation of the technical safety of semibatch processes with gas-liquid systems”.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Gross

Deputy spokesman of the steering committee

Prof. Dr. Andreas Gross is the head of the technology transfer and professional training division of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM in Bremen. He has also been the head of the Center for Adhesive Bonding Technology since 1997. He has lectured at Bremen University of Applied Sciences since 2000 and chairs various committees and workgroups within the German Welding Society (DVS). Prof. Gross studied chemistry and educational science at the University of Bielefeld from 1979-1985 and obtained his doctorate in 1987 on the subject of “Model reactions relating to the reaction mechanism of epoxy resins”.

Elisabeth Ewen

Elisabeth Ewen leads the Human Resources Department at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. She studied law at the University of Bonn from 1984 to 1990 and completed her legal traineeship at the Higher Regional Court in Dusseldorf. From 1991 to 1992, she studied at the University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer. Ms. Ewen supported the integration of the GMD Research Center for Information Technology in the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Since 2009, she is Head of the Human Resources Department at Fraunhofer and responsible for all strategic human resources functions including labor law issues. Since 2014, she teaches labor and industrial constitution law for the Leadership Development Programs of the Center for Sciences and Research Management in Speyer, Germany.

Prof. Dr. Michael Henke

Prof. Dr. Michael Henke completes the board of directors of Fraunhofer IML as new director of the section Enterprise Logistics and he also holds the chair of Enterprise Logistics at the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at TU Dortmund University succeeding Prof. Dr.-Ing. Axel Kuhn who held both positions for twenty years and who took his well-deserved retirement last year. Henke, who held the Chair of Purchasing and Supply Management at EBS European Business School in Wiesbaden, started his new career at Fraunhofer IML at the beginning of September 2013.

»With Prof. Dr. Henke we could win a proven supply chain expert for logistics in Dortmund. With respect to the central future topics like Industry 4.0 or Big Data the interaction of all disciplines is getting more and more important. As an economist Michael Henke is the perfect complement to our work and he will give new impetus to enterprise planning both at the Institute and at the chair«, Prof. Dr. Michael ten Hompel, managing director of Fraunhofer IML, is pleased.

Michael Henke began his career studying Brewing and Beverage Technology at the Technical University of Munich (Dipl.-Ing.). He gained his doctorate and habilitation in Business and Economics at the Technical University of Munich. During the last year of his habilitation Michael Henke was also working as senior consultant for the Supply Management Group SMG in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Since 2007 he was teaching and researching as professor at the EBS.

His research focuses lie among others on the area of e.g. management of the Industry 4.0, purchasing and supply management, supply chain risk management and financial supply chain management.

Dr. Dirk Hecker

Dr. Dirk Hecker is managing director of the "Fraunhofer Big Data Alliance", an association of 30 Fraunhofer institutes for cross-industry research and technology development in the field of Big Data. The Big Data Alliance is currently the largest association of institutes in a single topic area within the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and supports companies on their way to becoming a "data-driven company". Its services range from market-driven Big Data solutions for individual problems to the qualification of junior staff as data scientists. Dr. Hecker is also deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS. Dr. Dirk Hecker has many years of experience in leading research and industry projects in the field of data mining and machine learning. His current work focuses on Big Data Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Deep Learning and Mobility Mining. He studied geo-informatics at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn and received his PhD from the University of Cologne.

Dr. Hecker has been a member of the Fraunhofer Academy's Board of Directors since 2018.

Dr. Kai Kohler

Dr. Kai Kohler is currently Head of Major Strategic Projects at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart. Previously, he was head of the staff department Technology Marketing, responsible for a subsection of the Executive Board division Technology Marketing and Business Models at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Munich. His area of work included corporate business development, marketing and the Fraunhofer Academy. Prior to that, he worked for several years at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart in various positions.  

Before joining Fraunhofer, he completed his doctorate at the Chair of Economic Policy at the University of Ulm in the field of model-based quantification of macroeconomic growth strategies. He also completed his studies in economics with a focus on international economics at the University of Ulm.

Prof. Dr. Manfred Hauswirth

Prof. Dr. Manfred Hauswirth is the managing director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) and holds the chair for "Open Distributed Systems" at the TU Berlin. He conducts research on distributed information systems, the Internet of Things, stream data processing and Linked Data, semantics, and artificial intelligence. In these areas, he has won numerous international awards for his projects and is active in many scientific and political bodies shaping digitization. He is Principal Investigator and Director at the Weizenbaum Institute, the German Internet Institute, the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF), the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC), the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), and the Helmholtz-Einstein International Berlin Research School in Data Science (HEIBRiDS). Manfred Hauswirth is co-spokesperson for the field of quantum computing and spokesperson for the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's Quantum Computing Competence Network and was spokesperson for the Fraunhofer High Performance Center "Digital Networking" (2016-2018).

Prof. Dr. Andreas Gross, deputy spokesman of the steering committee:

“The advanced vocational training programs we offer are application-oriented, cutting-edge, and highly professional – and that’s because the people communicating our knowledge are the same ones who generated it in the first place.”