On 21 March 2023 the h_da Senate elected Prof. Dr. Matthias Vieth (59) to be the new Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Collegiate Affairs by a large majority of 24 votes in favour to 4 against. His first three-year term in office will begin on 1 October 2023. He will succeed Prof. Dr. Manfred Loch, who held the post from 2015 to 2022 and has now retired. During the interim period Dr. Tanja Münch will be the acting head of Teaching, Learning and Collegiate Affairs.

Prof. Dr. Matthias Vieth has been Professor of Business Administration at the Darmstadt Business School since 2016 and is currently Director of Studies for the Bachelor’s degree programme in business administration. While working on his PhD in business administration at Frankfurt’s Goethe University (which he completed in 1997), he began his professional career at Siemens AG. He spent more than ten years in national and international management positions at the company. He started in strategic purchasing and subsequently moved to controlling, quality management, project management, process management and risk management, and also worked in occupational safety and environmental conservation management. From 2008 onwards, he was a freelance corporate consultant involved in optimising change, project, process and risk management for industrial customers. 

At the h_da, for several years Prof. Dr. Matthias Vieth has been helping students to progress with their studies, in particular during the Corona pandemic. For example, while the pandemic was at its height he made sure that students could do the company internships required for their courses. Alongside numerous classes in business informatics, human resource management, process and project management, procurement, logistics and entrepreneurship, and the multi-university project management certificate HZPM, he has initiated three digitalisation projects at the University: the Student Compass as a platform for students to optimise their choice of degree courses, the human resource planning tool “PERPLAN light” for teaching and administration, and the real and virtual “Innovator’s Space”, where students’ start-up projects can be developed and presented.

“I would like to continue promoting connected, interdisciplinary cooperation in studying and teaching. Our students already practise modern working methods during their degree programmes,” says Prof. Dr. Matthias Vieth. “They should also benefit from our network as part of the European University of Technology and in the future be able to study abroad much more easily. Finally, I think it’s important that the h_da becomes even more attractive to people who are already in employment, by offering things like certification courses.”

Prof. Dr. Arnd Steinmetz, President of the h_da, congratulated Prof. Dr. Matthias Vieth on his election and said, “This completes the arrival of a new generation on our University Executive Board. As a team we wish to continue enabling our students to take courses that focus on practical application, and to do so in an increasingly European setting. I wish to thank Prof. Dr. Manfred Loch and Dr. Tanja Münch for their committed work and achievements over some eventful years.”