Prof. Dr Wolfgang Graf zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, Director of Department 5 Geoinformation at the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, took up a W3 professorship for “Geodata Science” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) from 01. March. The new professorship is located at the Institute of Statistics of the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics. It is a joint appointment with the GFZ according to the so-called Jülich model. Zu Castell will thus continue to work at the GFZ as Department Director and Chief Information Officer (CIO).
With his professorship at LMU, he will represent the field of “Geodata Science”, in particular the data-driven analysis of complex systems in theory and application, as well as the research of mathematical methods in imaging with a focus on geoscientific applications.
About person and career
Dr Wolfgang Graf zu Castell-Rüdenhausen holds a degree and doctorate in mathematics (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) and was habilitated in 2011 with his thesis “Contributions to the Theory of Positive Definite Functions and their Role in Applications” at the Technical University of Munich, where he has also been teaching since 2001. Since November 2021 he is Director of Department 5 Geoinformation at GFZ and CIO.
He is involved as chairman of the Open Science working group of the Helmholtz Association and in this role has contributed to various strategic papers of the association. He is a member of the steering groups of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC), Helmholtz Imaging (HIP), NFDI4Earth – the National Research Data Infrastructure for the Earth Sciences, and the DataHub of the Helmholtz Research Field “Earth & Environment”. In 2024 he was elected as a member of the Administrative Board of the German Research Network (DFN).
His scientific interests are in the fields of data-driven analysis and theory of complex systems, kernel-based methods in approximation, statistics and machine learning, mathematical methods in imaging, as well as applied data science. He is also involved in open science and digitalization in science organizations.
Before joining the GFZ, zu Castell was head of the Scientific Computing Department, the ICT Department and most recently the Strategy & Digitalization Department at what is now the Helmholtz Centre Munich – German Research Center for Environmental Health since 2005. In 2009 and 2016, he was a visiting professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch (New Zealand) for several months.
From 2001 to 2005, zu Castell worked as a research associate at the Institute of Biomathematics and Biometry at the “GSF Research Center for Environment and Health”, the predecessor institution of the Helmholtz Center Munich, interrupted from August 2002 to July 2003 by a position as visiting professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Virginia (USA).
