Prof. Peter Benner is Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg
Personnel announcements: regular change of the Managing Director
Jointly creating positive impacts and achieving relevant research results: This is the guiding principle of Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Peter Benner for his term of office as Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg. He will hold the position for 2025 and 2026; the rotation takes place every two years.
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Peter Benner, Director and Head of the Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory Department, has taken over the position of Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems for two years as of January 1, 2025.
He succeeds Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher, who headed the institute in 2023 and 2024.
The Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg currently consists of three Scientific Members of the Max Planck Society.
Jointly Creating Positive Impacts and Achieving Relevant Research Results
“Thank you for everything that makes us stand out as a team. Here's to a year of cohesion, success and confidence!” said Prof. Peter Benner, welcoming the MPI employees at the start of the New Year and on the occasion of taking office as Managing Director. “Let's look forward to 2025 with optimism. Together we can make a positive difference, for example through our research into sustainable chemical and biotechnological production or the use of renewable energies, and further strengthen our sense of community both inside and outside the MPI.”
The MPI team can look back on a fruitful 2024 with a successful review by the Scientific Advisory Board and the initiation of new excellent research and cooperation projects. “I am sure that we will meet the challenges of the New Year stronger and more closely connected than before. Of course, we hope for the success of the Excellence Strategy, but I am convinced that we will still be able to achieve many interesting and important research results!”, said Prof. Peter Benner.
About Prof. Dr. Peter Benner
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 Peter 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 700 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.
Peter Benner and his team, together with colleagues from OVGU, organized the annual conference of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) in Magdeburg with almost 1,000 participants in March 2024. For the period 2024 to 2028, he was elected spokesperson of the DFG (German Research Foundation) Review Board 3.31 “Mathematics”. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the “Dynamic Systems: Systems Engineering” research center (CDS) at OVGU Magdeburg, a board member of the Mathematical Research Data Initiative MaRDI and a member of the SmartProSys research initiative.
His current research interests focus on Scientific Machine Learning, Numerical Linear and Multilinear Algebra, Model Order Reduction and Reduced-order Modeling, Numerical Methods in Systems and Control Theory, Optimal and Feedback Control of Partial Differential Equations, High-performance and Power-aware Computing, and Mathematical Software.