Prof. Dr.-Ing. Susanne Staude, born 1970, grew up in Bremen. After graduating from high school, she moved to London, where she studied environmental engineering at Brunel University. Several years as a development engineer in the automotive industry in England and Germany; doctorate in combustion technology from the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2010. In 2011, Susanne Staude was appointed Professor of Thermodynamics at the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences. There she took over the office of Vice President for Studies and Teaching in 2015; since 2019 she has been President of the Hochschule Ruhr West.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Martin Paul, born in 1958, has been President of Maastricht University in the Netherlands for ten years. After working as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the University of Heidelberg, he held the Chair of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Free University of Berlin from 1997 to 2008, and at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin from 2003. In 2008, he accepted an appointment to the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences at Maastricht University. Before he was elected President there, he was, among other things, Dean of his Faculty and Vice-President of the Maastricht University Hospital. Martin Paul studied human medicine in Heidelberg from 1978 to 1985 and completed his doctorate and habilitation there.
On 1 November 2021, Prof. Dr. Paul will take over as Rector of the Ruhr University Bochum.

Prof. Dr. Stephan Jolie (née Fuchs) studied German, philosophy and musicology in Frankfurt am Main and Munich before receiving his doctorate in Frankfurt in 1995. After working as an academic teacher in Frankfurt, Berlin and Nuremberg, he was appointed to the professorship for literature of the older eras at the German Institute of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in 2007. From 2011-2017 he was Dean of the Department of Philosophy and Philology, and since 2018 he has served as Vice President for Studies and Teaching at JGU.

Prof. Dr. Frank Ziegele, has been Professor of Higher Education and Science Management at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences since 2004 and Managing Director of CHE Gemeinnütziges Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung GmbH since 2008. Previously, he was a research assistant at the Ruhr University in Bochum, a project manager at CHE, a lecturer at various universities and managing director of CHE Consult. He is currently co-editor of the journals “Wissenschaftsmanagement” and “Application-Oriented Higher Education Research” and a member of the advisory board of the journal “Wissenschaft & Management”. He is also a member of the advisory board of FORTRAMA Netzwerks Forschungs- und Transfermanagement e.V.. For several years he was on the board of the Society for Higher Education Research. In the last 20 years, he has written more than 150 publications on higher education management and policy, and has led a wide range of national and international organisational development and research projects in the same field. He was and is a member of expert commissions, trainer in advanced training programmes in science management and consultant, for example, on behalf of the World Bank. In Osnabrück he leads the study programmes MBA in Higher Education and Science Management and Master in Research and Innovation in Higher Education.

Dr. Kerstin Prechel is Professor of Business Administration at the DHSH and conducts research on “Ethics in Artificial Intelligence”. She is a teaching fellow at the AI Campus and works as a lecturer at HAW Hamburg in a project on the interdisciplinary teaching of AI for students in the field of public management. The synergies between science and business benefit Prof. Dr. Prechel’s clients, whom she advises on compliance and sustainability in the use of AI.

Prof. Florian Wellmann works and teaches at the interface between geosciences and programming – among others in the field of machine learning and AI in geosciences. He is actively involved in the integration of new methods into teaching, for example interactive programming, virtual and augmented reality methods, and the integration of OER offerings. Within the framework of a fellowship, Prof. Wellmann is active in the AI campus.

Pam Fredman is the current President of the International Association of Universities, a global network of Higher Education Institutions and organizations created under the auspices of UNESCO. Her academic background is Professor of Neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and she has been and is active in many of scientific and scholarly contexts. She has extensive experience from academic leadership and between 2006-2017 acting rector at the University of Gothenburg and as chair of the Swedish rector conference2009-2014. During the same period, she was a member of the council of European University Association, EUA, and the EUA Research Policy Working Group. Pam Fredman has participated in political initiatives and policy development in Sweden. On behalf of the Swedish government, she recently led the investigation on governmental steering and resource allocation to Swedish higher education institutions. She is the chair of the Swedish leadership courses for vice chancellors and deans.

Dr. Amy Ogan is the Thomas and Lydia Moran Assistant Professor of Learning Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies, designs, and builds educational technologies, with a focus on culturally aware design. Dr. Ogan received her doctorate at CMU in Human-Computer Interaction as an Institute of Education Sciences Fellow. She has since been named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT, a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, received the McCandless Early Career Chair, and been awarded the Jacobs Early Career Fellowship to study the use of educational technologies in emerging economies. Amy has been a visiting researcher at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and has conducted field research on the deployment of educational technology in field sites across four continents. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, the XPRIZE Foundation, the Jacobs Foundation, and the McDonnell Foundation.

Jeff Grabill is Deputy Vice Chancellor for Student Education at the University of Leeds. Prior to joining the University of Leeds, Grabill was at Michigan State University (MSU) in the United States for nearly 20 years. He served Michigan State University as the Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. In that role, he was responsible for acilitating innovation in learning via his role as Director of the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and educator professional development through the MSU’s Academic Advancement Network. At MSU, Grabill was a Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing. His research focuses on how digital writing is associated with citizenship and learning. That work has been located in community contexts, in museums, and in classrooms at both the K-12 and university levels. Grabill is also a co-founder of Drawbridge, an educational technology company.

Barbara Moser-Mercer, professor emerita and founder of InZone (University of Geneva), is visiting professor at University of Nairobi, engaged in strengthening African solutions that advance higher education in emergencies (HEiE) and currently coordinating the launch phase of the African Higher Education in Emergencies Network (AHEEN). Following her initial training as a conference interpreter she pursued her studies in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Her research has focused on the development of expertise in complex cognitive skills of bilinguals, both from a cognitive psychology and a cognitive neuro-science perspective. These findings have been instrumental in informing the design and the development of student-centered multilingual digital learning environments in fragile
contexts, which she has leveraged across several refugee camps in Africa and the Middle East.