Prof. Peter Benner becomes Managing Director

Rotation of leadership at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg

January 18, 2021
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Peter Benner will hold the role of Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg for 2021 and 2022. This position is rotated every two years between the directors of the Institute. The Board of Directors is comprised of four scientific members of the Max Planck Society.

From 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2022, Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Peter Benner will hold the role of Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg. A new Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg is appointed every two years from the Board of Directors, which is comprised of four scientific members of the Max Planck Society.

Peter Benner was born in Kirchen/Sieg, Germany, in 1967. After studying mathematics at RWTH Aachen University he gained his doctorate in the field of mathematics at TU Chemnitz-Zwickau (Chemnitz University of Technology) in 1997. From 1997 to 2001 he was a Scientific Assistant at the Centre for Industrial Mathematics (ZeTeM) at the University of Bremen. He qualified as a university lecturer there in 2001.

From 2002 to 2003 Benner was a lecturer at the Institute of Mathematics at TU Berlin. Before that he was a visiting professor at TU Hamburg-Harburg. In 2003 he became Professor of "Mathematics in Industry and Technology" at TU Chemnitz. Benner commenced his research at the Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg with his Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory group in 2010. In early 2011 Peter Benner was appointed Honorary Professor of Mathematics at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. He heads the working group on Numerical Methods in Systems and Control Theory there at the Institute of Analysis and Numerics.

He has been a visiting scholar/professor at the following institutions and more: the University of Kansas, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Courant Institute at New York University, Virginia Tech, the ULCO (Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale) in Calais, Shanghai University and the Oden Institute at the University of Texas in Austin.

Peter Benner is the author of over 500 publications in scientific journals and books. He is the joint editor of various publications and mathematical journals as well as the co-author of various software packages. He is actively involved in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) along with various leading German and international mathematical bodies. He has been a SIAM Fellow since 2017 and a member of the SIAM Council since 2019. From 2020 to 2023 he is a member of the 312 Mathematics Review Board of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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