Wolfgang A. Herrmann turns over presidency to Thomas F. Hofmann

Leadership handover at TUM

"A guiding principle I have always lived by is the need to break free from habitual thought patterns," said Wolfgang A. Herrmann. "And what goes without saying in the adventure of scientific research should also apply when leading a university. But a president can succeed only if he gets the university community on board when setting out on the road to the future. Watching the TUM family grow closer together across the generations in recent years has been a source of joy. It has also filled me with pride to see what we have achieved for society: important discoveries to address future global issues, producing highly skilled graduates in many fields, from medicine to teaching, and dynamic start-ups that are making innovations available to everyone."

Thomas F. Hofmann said that TUM's commitment to social responsibility will only increase in the future: "We have to work with society to shape the rapid advances in technology in order to preserve democracy, peace and prosperity. That is why the university must continue to embrace change. The departments will intensify their cooperation, we will increase our commitment to diversity among researchers and the student body, and we will encourage unconventional and interdisciplinary approaches."

With the encouragement and support of the reform-minded Bavarian Minister President Dr. Edmund Stoiber, Wolfgang A. Herrmann expanded the university's autonomy to new dimensions, engaged in international competition and executed an enormous number of rapid-fire reforms, many of which set new standards for the German research system. These include the new university constitution, with a board of trustees as a supervisory body (1999), and the TUM Faculty Tenure Track system (2012), which gives TUM a big competitive edge when recruiting top international talent. This enabled Herrmann – himself a successful chemist – to appoint outstanding academics from highly respected institutions in Germany and abroad. This is making the face of the TUM faculty younger, more female and more international than ever before.

Thanks to his continuous efforts to expand the interdisciplinary dimension of the research organization, TUM is now in a position to fully leverage the potential of its range of subject areas, which is unrivalled in Europe. Key milestones have included the establishment of the Integrative Research Centers that pool expertise in a given field of research, such as the Munich School of BioEngineering (2015), the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (2018), and the Munich Center for Technology in Society (2012). The integration of social sciences was a historic step for TUM. Herrmann pushed the establishment and networking of departments of management science (2002) and political science (2016) by focusing on the programmatic interplay of these fields with technological progress.

In another interdisciplinary initiative during Herrmann's time as president, TUM freed its degree programs from the rigid links to specific subject areas and instead aligned course contents with future priorities. Today TUM is sixth worldwide in the Global University Employability Rankings, which rate the quality of graduates. Herrmann introduced selective processes for student admissions (2000), resulting in higher degree completion rates than at other universities. At the same time, TUM has doubled the number of students within 15 years to 40,000. Foreign students now make up 30 percent of the total. The TUM School of Education (2009) became a role model for German universities as the first department to be responsible for the teaching degree programs based on empirical research in the field.

Since the millennium, Herrmann has turned TUM into one of Europe's most successful universities for promoting start-ups. TUM currently incubates more than 70 technology start-ups every year. Herrmann has boosted cooperative partnerships with research-driven companies, which increasingly include international global players, largely through his "Industry on Campus" strategy.

The outgoing President was guided by the motto "connecting home with the world". With the opening of the Singapore campus in 2002, TUM became the first German university to establish a campus abroad. Today it has liaison offices on five continents. Herrmann has initiated partnerships with the best universities, most recently with the Imperial College London (2018). At the same time he has reinforced TUM's Bavarian roots with the expansion of the Straubing campus (2001/2017) and the establishment of the TUM Science & Study Center in the historical Raitenhaslach monastery (2016).

Thomas F. Hofmann has already made important contributions to many of TUM's successes. The experienced university manager has served for 10 years as the Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at TUM. He worked with Wolfgang A. Herrmann to draft the latest Excellence Strategy that will bring about further far-reaching changes over the coming years.

The traditional 15 departments will be replaced by seven schools that will intensify interdisciplinary cooperation. TUM will undertake a massive expansion in the humanities and social sciences to integrate those areas into the research projects and the degree programs of the engineering sciences. The goal is a fundamental cultural transformation of engineering sciences, aligning them more closely with the needs of society. This commitment to 'human-centered engineering' will foster a new, TUM-specific brand identity.

Hofmann intends to offer even greater scope for visionary and adventurous research ideas. Project teams grouped in "TUM Innovation Networks" will receive multi-year start-up funding to assess the outlook of their undertaking.

TUM's teaching activities will be opened up to offer a wide range of life-long learning options, especially for working alumni. Within the university, Hofmann plans to improve career opportunities for mid-level academics – a group widely seen as neglected at German universities – by setting talent-specific priorities in teaching, research and science management. In international relations, TUM will focus more attention on the emerging African countries while recalling its European roots.