1974-79 Christoph Meinel studied Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the Humboldt-University in Berlin where he also received his PhD degree in 1981. 1988 he defended his second doctorate at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. After German reunification, he held visiting positions at the universities of Saarbrücken and Paderborn. In 1992 he was appointed full professor for computer science at the University of Trier. In that time his research activities were concentrated on computational complexity theory and efficient data structures for chip design. In the mid-nineties he extended his research focus to Internet and Web technologies, conducting applied research and development in IT security and teleteaching. At that time he founded the Institut für Telematik e.V., which was supervised by the Fraunhofer Society for applied research. There he invented technologies such as the high security solution Lock-Keeper and Tele-TASK for recording and Internet-broadcasting lectures and presentations. Between 1996 and 2007 Meinel was a member of the scientific board of the IBFI Schloß Dagstuhl and speaker of the special interest group on complexity of the German computer science society Gesellschaft für Informatik. In 2004, he was appointed scientific director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute and full professor for Internet Technologies and Systems at the University of Potsdam. He is also a teacher at the HPI School of Design Thinking and program director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is a member of acatech, the national German academy of science and engineering. Christoph Meinel is chairman of the German IPv6 council, and program director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is the head of the steering committee of the HPI Future SOC Lab, and member of various advisory boards like the security advisory board of SAP. In 2006, he and Hasso Plattner hosted the first German “National IT-Summit” of the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2019 Christoph Meinel was admitted to the "". This was in recognition of his decade-long commitment to the development and dissemination of the new IPv6 Internet protocol standard. His research interests and activities are concentrated on Internet Technology and Systems and on innovation research. According to his web page, he is particularly focused on:
Knowledge engineering and teaching technology, Web 3.0, Secure digital health, and
Innovation research in the field of Design Thinking.
Besides his teaching activities in Potsdam, he is an honorary professor at the Technical University of Beijing and the University of Dalian, a visiting professor at the Shanghai University, and was a senior research fellow at the University of Luxembourg. Christoph Meinel chairs or is a member of various international scientific boards and program committees, and has organized several internal symposia and conferences.
Publishing and Editorial Work
Christoph Meinel is author, co-author, or editor of 15 text books. Among these are "Blogoshere and its Exploration", "Internetworking", "Digitale Kommunikation", "WWW – Kommunikation, Internetworking, Web-Technologien", "Design Thinking – Innovation lernen, Ideenwelten öffnen", "Mathematische Grundlagen der Informatik", "Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen im VLSI-Design. OBDDs – Grundlagen und Anwendungen", and of various conference proceedings. Christoph Meinel has published more than 550 per-reviewed scientific papers in international scientific journals and conferences. He holds various international patents, and is editor-in-chief of the two scientific E-journals Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity and Electronic Colloquium on Design Thinking Research, of the IT-Gipfelblog, and of the tele-TASK portal with several thousands of multimedia lecture recordings by tele-TASK.
MOOCs and Teleteaching
Many lectures and lecture series' of Christoph Meinel are recorded and freely accessible on the Internet via the tele-TASK portal. In 2012 his team designed the first European MOOC platform openHPI which provides many free online courses in the field of IT-technologies. Meanwhile, openHPI counts more than 500.000 enrollments and more than 175.000 unique users. He also offers various massive open online courses, for example on Blockchains, Internet Security for Beginners, Internet and Web Technologies with about 10.000 enrolled learners each. As a chairman of various Cloud-Learning initiatives Christoph Meinel leads innovations in the field of the digital transformation of the German education sector. With projects such as "Bildungscloud" and ":de:Schul-Cloud|Schul-Cloud" Cloud-based Learning environments are created to promote the use of digital media in schools and other educational instances.
