Christoph Meinel

Christoph Meinel (Univ.-Prof., Dr. sc. nat., Dr. rer. nat., born 14 April 1954, Meißen, Germany) is a German scientist and university professor of computer sciences. He is president and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) for IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam (Germany), and a professor for Internet Technologies and Systems.
He is a member of acatech, the national German academy of science and engineering. Christoph Meinel is chairman of the German IPv6 council, and program director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is the head of the steering committee of the HPI Future SOC Lab, and member of various advisory boards like the security advisory board of SAP. In 2006, he and Hasso Plattner hosted the first German “National IT-Summit” of the German Federal Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel.
His actual research interests and activities are concentrated on Internet Technology and Systems and on innovation research. He is particularly focused on:
Security engineering (Internet security, safer Internet, SOA security, Trust, security awareness),
Knowledge engineering and teaching tex (MOOCs and openHPI, e-learning and tele-TASK, Web3.0, Secure digital health), and
Innovation research in the field of Design Thinking.

1974-79 Christoph Meinel studied Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the Humboldt-University in Berlin where he received also his PhD degree in 1981. 1988 he defended his State Doctorate (Dr. sc. nat. "Habilitation") at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
After visiting positions at the universities of Saarbrücken and Paderborn, in 1992 he was appointed a full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Trier (Germany). In that time his research activities were concentrated in computational complexity theory and efficient data structures (esp. binary decision diagrams - BDDs) for chip design.
In the mid nineties he extended his research focus to Internet and Web-technologies, particularly he started applied research and development in IT-Security and Teleteaching. In that time he founded the Institut für Telematik e.V., which was supervised by the Fraunhofer Society for applied research. There he invented technologies like the high security solution Lock-Keeper and Tele-TASK for recording and Internet-broadcasting lectures and presentations.
In between 1996-2007 Meinel was member of the scientific board of the IBFI Schloß Dagstuhl and speaker of the special interest group on complexity of the German computer science society Gesellschaft für Informatik.
In 2004, he was appointed scientific director and CEO of the HPI, and full professor for Internet Technologies and Systems at the university of Potsdam (Germany). He is also a teacher at the HPI School of Design Thinking and program director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program.
Besides his teaching activities in Potsdam he is an honorary professor at the Technical University of Beijing (China), a visiting professor at the Shanghai university (China), and a senior research fellow of SnT at the University of Luxembourg. Christoph Meinel chairs or is a member of various international scientific boards and program committees, and has organised several internal symposia and conferences.

Christoph Meinel is author, co-author, or editor of 15 text books. Among these are "Blogoshere and its Exploration", "Internetworking", "Digitale Kommunikation", "WWW – Kommunikation, Internetworking, Web-Technologien", "Design Thinking – Innovation lernen, Ideenwelten öffnen", "Mathematische Grundlagen der Informatik", "Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen im VLSI-Design. OBDDs – Grundlagen und Anwendungen", and of various conference proceedings.

Christoph Meinel has published more than 500 per-reviewed scientific papers in international scientific journals and conferences. He holds various international patents (e.g. Lock-Keeper, tele-TASK, and Tele-Board), and is chief editor of the two scientific E-journals ECCC-Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity and ECDTR-Electronic Colloquium on Design Thinking Research, of the IT-Gipfelblog, and of the tele-TASK portal with several thousands of multimedia lecture recordings by tele-TASK.

Many lectures and lectures series of Christoph Meinel are recorded and freely accessible in the Internet via the tele-TASK portal.

In 2012 he developed with his team the first European MOOC platform openHPI which provides free online courses in the field of IT-technologies. On this platform he offered more than 30 massive open online courses, e.g. on "Internet Technologies", or on "Internet Security". The MOOC platform OpenHPI counts more than 315.000 enrollments (Nov. 2016) and more than 125.000 unique users. As a chairman of various Cloud-Learning initiatives Christoph Meinel leads innovations in the field of the digital transformation of the German education sector. With projects like "Bildungscloud" and "Schul-Cloud" Cloud-based Learning environments are created to promote the use of digital media in schools and other educational instances.