President Dr Heide Naderer bid farewell to the outgoing Dean and the Associate Dean and welcomed Professor Dr Andreas Schürholz as the new Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Environment, as well as Professor Dr Nele Wild-Wall as the new Associate Dean.
Kleve/Kamp-Lintfort, 29 February 2016: As part of the official handover of the deanship, the President of Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Dr Heide Naderer, bid farewell to the outgoing Dean, Professor Dr Sandro Leuchter, and the Vice-Dean, Professor Dr Frank Zimmer, and thanked them for their dedication and contribution to the development of Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences at the Kamp-Lintfort campus.
Professor Dr Sandro Leuchter, Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Environment and Professor of Distributed Systems at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, will take up the Chair in ‘Distributed and Mobile Applications’ at the Faculty of Computer Science at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences on 1 March 2016. He took over the post of Dean on 1 September 2015 from the founding Dean, Professor Dr Ingeborg Schramm-Wölk, and has since been involved in the further development of the Faculty of Communication and Environment at the Kamp-Lintfort campus.
Professor Dr Frank Zimmer, the founding Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Environment, will also step down from his post on 1 March 2016. He will continue to work as a professor of Computer Science, (Internet) Programming, System Software and Business Information Systems at Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Kamp-Lintfort.
New Dean and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Environment
The President also introduced the new members of the Dean’s Council of the Faculty of Communication and Environment. Professor Dr Andreas Schürholz, Professor of Production and Logistics, will take up the post of Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Environment with effect from 1 March 2016. Professor Dr Nele Wild-Wall, Professor of Research Methods and Diagnostics in Psychology, will support Professor Schürholz as the new Vice-Dean.
Following the establishment phase at the Faculty of Communication and Environment in Kamp-Lintfort, during which twelve accredited degree programmes were created and various high-tech laboratories for research and teaching were set up, and 30 professors, as well as a considerable number of staff members, have taken up their posts; the next phase of staff expansion is now imminent as part of the Higher Education Pact funded by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. This is also urgently needed to ensure that students continue to receive high-quality support. Compared with the original plans, the student capacity at the Faculty of Communication and Environment in Kamp-Lintfort has now been expanded to around 1,800 places.
One of the new Dean’s Office’s first key tasks will be to draw up a strategic faculty development plan, in collaboration with the professors and staff of the faculty, which is intended in particular to sharpen the faculty’s academic profile by 2023. It is already becoming clear that interdisciplinarity will continue to be promoted as a particular strength of the Faculty of Communication and Environment. This means that the links between the faculty’s diverse disciplines – such as design, logistics, economics, computer science, psychology, environmental sciences and engineering – will be further strengthened and applied to real-world economic and social issues in interdisciplinary and project-based courses. Not least, the upcoming 2020 State Garden Show in Kamp-Lintfort will present a special opportunity to which the Faculty of Communication and Environment intends to contribute its expertise. Furthermore, the university’s international character – a key distinguishing feature of Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences – is to be further enhanced in terms of quality.
Professor Dr Andreas Schürholz studied Computer Science at the University of Dortmund, where he spent many years as a research fellow at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics. There, he gained extensive experience in the planning and analysis of internal and external logistics processes through numerous industrial projects. After completing his PhD whilst working, he joined a major international automotive supplier, where, as ‘Global Head of Logistics’, he was able to expand and deepen his wealth of logistical experience in a practice-oriented manner over a period of more than ten years. In 2010, Dr Schürholz was appointed Professor of Production and Logistics at Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences. There, he helped to establish the English-language degree programme ‘Mobility and Logistics’, which he continues to lead as Programme Director to this day.
Professor Dr Nele Wild-Wall studied psychology at Humboldt University in Berlin. She joined the Leibniz Institute for Work Research in Dortmund in 2004. Whilst working full-time, she completed the ‘Social Gerontology’ diploma programme at TU Dortmund University in 2009. In 2011, she took up a post at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences as Professor of ‘Research Methods and Diagnostics in Psychology’. In October 2014, she was awarded the ‘venia legendi’ for the subject of psychology at TU Dortmund University. Professor Wild-Wall’s research interests lie in the investigation of mental functions and their age-related changes using experimental neurophysiological methods.
