IU INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES EXPANDS ITS GOVERNING BODY

Erfurt, 27 May 2021 - IU International University of Applied Sciences has appointed two new members to its Prorectorate: Prof. Dr. Regina Cordes and Prof. Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya. Both were appointed by the Senate for four years at the suggestion of the Rector Prof. Dr. Holger Sommerfeldt and will assume their positions on 1 June.

Prof. Dr. Regina Cordes is the new Vice-Rector in charge of accreditation and certification. On the academic side, she also coordinates the university's integrated offer formats such as Kombistudium(part-time studies), myStudium ("blended learning") as well as continuing education and corporate universities. Cordes has been Professor of Human Resources and Organisation at IU International University of Applied Sciences for two and a half years and focuses on New Work. In her previous position, she was responsible for the academic programme development team in distance learning. Previously, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for three years, where she researched leadership issues. She completed her doctorate in marketing at the University of Mannheim in 2010.

Prof. Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya will be in charge of Research and Transfer as Vice-Rector in the future. He has been a professor of computer science at IU International University of Applied Sciences since 2019, specialising in software engineering and development. He has spent most of his career in industrial research at IBM, working on software-based process optimisation and cloud computing. Bhattacharya has worked on technologies applied to critical problems in developing countries and has established several research and innovation centres in Africa in this subject area. He is active in the start-up scene, has founded several start-ups himself and works as a consultant. He completed his doctorate in physics at the Georg-August University of Göttingen with a focus on statistical mechanics.

"I am very pleased that we can further expand the expertise in our prorectorate with Regina Cordes and Kamal Bhattacharya and assert ourselves as a diverse and international university. With the new leadership team, we want to be even more future-proof and continue to make a great contribution to making education worldwide more modern, flexible and accessible to genuinely everyone," says Prof. Dr. Holger Sommerfeldt, Rector of IU International University of Applied Sciences.