In January 2024, the Supervisory Board of KIT elected Professor Jan S. Hesthaven as President, the confirmation by the KIT Senate followed in February. During the transition period, Professor Oliver Kraft, Vice President Research of KIT, has taken over the internal and external representation of KIT. Hesthaven succeeds Professor Holger Hanselka as President of KIT, who moved to the top of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in August 2023.
Leveraging KIT's further potential
"KIT is an institution with enormous potential, both nationally and internationally. My clear goal is to build on its strengths, make them even more visible and make even better use of the numerous fields with particular strengths," says Hesthaven. Research and teaching are facing fundamental changes in the coming years, not least due to the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence. According to Hesthaven, it is now time to discuss how KIT as an institution wants to deal with this. Within the Helmholtz Association, KIT should take on a central role as the research university, he emphasized. To achieve this, KIT must open itself up even more internationally and attract strong partners and talent from around the world.
Expert in information sciences
With Professor Jan S. Hesthaven, KIT has gained a proven expert in the transfer of information science to business and society. For example, he has developed new computing methods and algorithms for machine learning, mainframe computers and complex simulations. Since 2021, he has been Provost and Vice President of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Hesthaven had been Professor of Mathematics there since 2013. Prior to that, he had been a faculty member at Brown University since 1995, where he was the 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. He is a Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, the American Mathematical Society and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. In May 2024, the Technical University of Denmark awarded him an honorary doctorate.