At its meeting on 12 January 2024, the Senate of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) confirmed Prof. Dr. Georg Krausch in his office as President of JGU. With 32 valid votes cast and one abstention, the incumbent President was unanimously elected for a fourth term of office from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2031. The Senate thus followed the preceding unanimous vote of the University Council in favor of the 62-year-old physicist, after the Rhineland-Palatinate Science Minister Clemens Hoch had also approved the nomination.
One of Krausch’s strategic priorities in his fourth term of office will be to significantly improve the structural situation on campus, particularly by increasing the sustainability of the university buildings and the attractiveness of the campus through modern teaching spaces as well as through unsealing and greening of surfaces. Another focus will be on the further development of modern university teaching, for example through new forms of collaborative learning, variety of methods and participation formats. In the medium term, lifelong learning is to become an integral part of the courses on offer. In addition, traditional structures and processes will be modified in order to successfully support early career researchers. Furthermore, Krausch will also continue to focus on the positioning of the Rhine-Main science region as a future-oriented and internationally competitive center of science and research in the strategic alliance of the RMU.
Georg Krausch was born in 1961 and studied Physics at the University of Konstanz. After completing his doctorate and acquiring his post-doctoral lecturing qualification, he was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / LMU Munich from 1996 to 1998. In 1998, he was assigned to the Chair of Physical Chemistry at Bayreuth University. Krausch has more than 160 research publications to his name, which have been cited over 10,000 times. In recognition of his research work, he was appointed a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2009. Since 2013, he has been a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech). In 2014, he was awarded the Leibniz Medal of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz; in March 2020, he was appointed full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2021/2022, he was the State Coordinator for Biotechnology in Rhineland-Palatinate, and from 2020 to 2023 he was Chairman of the German U15 association of universities, of which he had been Deputy Chairman since 2014. In November 2023, Prof. Dr. Georg Krausch was elected HRK Vice President for Research, Academic Career Paths.