Director

Prof. Dr. Stefan Decker was appointed head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT as of September 1, 2015. At the same time as his new position at Fraunhofer, he has accepted an appointment to Chair of Information Systems and Databases at RWTH Aachen University.

From July 2006 to August 2015, Prof. Decker was Professor of Digital Enterprise at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Executive Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). He also was one of the founding directors of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in Ireland.

Stefan Decker studied computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern, from which he graduated. He received his doctorate from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Karlsruhe. He then spent four years in the USA conducting research at Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

At Fraunhofer FIT, his research focuses on global information systems, web science and the semantic web. His research interests include data science and data spaces, linked data management, open data and the application of linked data in research data management, cultural heritage and life sciences. Another focus is online data protection.

Prof. Decker is a member of the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII), a body set up by the Joint Science Conference of the Federal Government and the Länder (GWK) to advise the Federal Government and the Länder governments on issues relating to information infrastructures for German academic and research institutions.