Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Heribert Vollmer

Au cœur de la Matière,

Un Cœur du Monde,

Le Cœur d'un Dieu.

              — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Heribert Vollmer, born in 1964, studied computer science with a focus on computational linguistics at the Rhineland-Palatinate University of Education in Koblenz from 1984 to 1989. From 1989 to 1994, he was a research assistant, first at the University of Frankfurt, then at the University of Würzburg. In 1994, he completed his doctorate on the subject of "Complexity classes of functions".

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded him a Feodor Lynen Scholarship for a stay abroad at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He worked there as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995. From 1995 to 2002, he worked as a research assistant at the University of Würzburg. In 2000, he habilitated there with a monograph on "Some Aspects of the Computational Power of Boolean Circuits of Small Depth" and was awarded a teaching qualification in computer science. He was employed as a private lecturer at the University of Würzburg until 2002.

In March 2002, he accepted an appointment at Leibniz Universität Hannover, where he has been Professor of Theoretical Computer Science and Managing Director of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science ever since. Prof. Vollmer has published over 140 papers on theoretical computer science topics in scientific journals and conference proceedings. He wrote a textbook "Introduction to Circuit Complexity" and is the author and co-editor of five other books. He has also published on the history of logic and on philosophical questions in the field of mind and intelligence in humans and machines. Prof. Vollmer is editor of the journal "ACM Transactions on Computational Logic". He served as Dean of Studies for Computer Science at Leibniz University from 2015-2023. Until 2023, he was spokesperson for the "Foundations of Computer Science" department of the German Informatics Society. In 2023, the German Informatics Society appointed him as the German representative on Technical Committee 1 "Foundations of Computer Science" of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). He is a member of the Academic Freedom Network and a liaison lecturer for the network at Leibniz University.