PD Dr. Wolfgang Graf zu Castell-Rüdenhausen is the new Director of the Department "Data, Information and IT Services" and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the German Research Centre for Geosciences since 1 November. He succeeds Dr Jörn Lauterjung, who retired in September 2020. Martin Hammitzsch had been acting head of the department since 1 September. We sincerely thank him for taking on this task.

Zu Castell comes from Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health, where he was the Head of the Department for "Information and Communication Technology" and the Department for "Digitalisation", as well as the "Information Technology Security Officer". In the Helmholtz Association, he is Chair of the Working Group "Open Science", a member of the Taskforce "Digitisation" and has contributed to the Helmholtz Association's digitisation strategy.

Zu Castell studied mathematics at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg. Since 2001 he has been teaching at the Technical University of Munich, where he also completed his habilitation with his thesis "Contributions to the Theory of Positive Definite Functions and their Role in Applications". Since 2005 he was first head of the Computational Mathematics group and from 2008 head of the Scientific Computing department at Helmholtz Zentrum München. The focus of his work was to combine the operational management of the IT infrastructure with method development in the fields of scientific computing and data-driven analysis.

Contact:

Dr. Wolfgang zu Castell-Rüdenhausen
Head Data, Information, and IT Services
Telegrafenberg
14473 Potsdam
Phone: +49 331 288-1020
Email: wolfgang.zu.castell-ruedenhausen@gfz-potsdam.de