The scientific directorate of the Institute of Applied Research (IAF) at the HFT Stuttgart as a new management team: Prof. Dr. -Ing. Dieter Uckelmann, previously deputy IAF director, takes over the position of scientific director. His deputies are Prof. Dr.-Ing. Berndt Zeitler and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heidrun Bögner-Balz. The IAF focuses in particular on the design of liveable, networked and resilient metropolitan regions of tomorrow.
Dieter Uckelmann has been Professor of Information Logistics at HFT Stuttgart since 2012 and is involved in the areas of digitalization and information management. He is the speaker of the research focus "Smart Technologies, Processes and Methods". His research activities cover applications in the Internet of Things in the areas of Industry 4.0, logistics, smart building and smart city as well as digital transformation in teaching. He is co-editor of the "International Journal of RF-Technologies: Research and Applications". From 2005 to early 2012, he was the managing director of the LogDynamics Lab at the University of Bremen. Prior to his academic career, he served as managing director in several companies in the information and communication technology industry. Uckelmann completed his mechanical engineering studies in Braunschweig and earned his doctorate in production engineering at the University of Bremen.
Berndt Zeitler, deputy director of the IAF, has held this position since 2019. He has been teaching at HFT Stuttgart in the field of building and room acoustics since 2015. In addition, he is the spokesman of the research focus "Future-oriented planning, building and management". He is also the speaker of the competence center "Center for Acoustic and Thermal Building Physics" (ZFB) and head of the laboratory for acoustics. Before Zeitler came to HFT Stuttgart, he was research group leader of the acoustics group at the National Research Council Canada (NRC). After earning his doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin, where he also previously studied electrical engineering, he worked in the research department at Rolls-Royce Germany.
New to the team is Heidrun Bögner-Balz. She has been a professor of sustainable materials in construction at HFT Stuttgart since 2021. Prior to that, she worked for 22 years in materials testing and research in the field of membrane construction, among other things as head of the laboratory as well as the PÜZ office (testing, monitoring and certification office). at Dekra Automobil GmbH in Stuttgart. At the same time, she worked at the IMS BAUHAUS® Archineer® Institut e.V. of the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau from 2006 in various functions: as research director, lecturer and visiting professor and meanwhile as first director. Heidrun Bögner Balz studied civil engineering and earned her doctorate at the Institute for Materials at the University of Stuttgart.
Working with the management team is Vice Rector Research and Digitization Prof. Dr.-Ing. Volker Coors . The geoinformatics expert headed the IAF directorate from 2019 to March 2023. Prof. Dr. Uta Bronner , who had been a member of the directorate since 2018, had temporarily taken over as acting director. Bronner is leaving the directorate at her own request to focus on further developing her teaching and research in the field of business psychology. The new team thanks Coors and Bronner for their outstanding leadership and further development of the IAF as well as for their valuable input in the area of research transfer and wishes them all the best for their future projects at HFT.
The Institute for Applied Research is the central scientific institution of the HFT Stuttgart. Under the IAF umbrella are ten competence centers with a research spectrum ranging from sustainable urban development, integral architecture, sustainable energy technology, acoustic and thermal building physics to sustainable business and management, mobility and transport, geodesy and geoinformatics, industrial applications of computer science and mathematics, digitalization in research, teaching and business, and new research fields. The HFT has thus made a name for itself as a research-active university among all German universities of applied sciences.