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The contract has been signed and now it’s official: The science manager and historian Dr Markus Zanner will be the new secretary general of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation effective 1 May. He will head the administrative offices of the Humboldt Foundation, a funding organisation that is dedicated to promoting international exchange between scientists and scholars and has more than 290 employees in Bonn and Berlin.
“I am pleased that with Markus Zanner the Humboldt Foundation has recruited a very experienced science manager to be its secretary general”, said Robert Schlögl, president of the Humboldt Foundation. “He has developed enormous expertise managing universities and has distinguished himself in ambitious university expansions, such as his excellent work in the establishment of the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). I am confident that he’s the right person for the Humboldt Foundation. Speaking personally, I look forward to working with such an open and dedicated person in the coming years.”
Markus Zanner was born in Weiden, Upper Palatinate, in 1967. He pursued history, religious studies, and Romance studies at the University of Regensburg. As part of his studies, he spent a year studying history and anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de Misiones in Posadas, Argentina. In 2000, he earned his doctorate at the University of Regensburg. He began his career at TUM in Munich, where his functions included head of the Excellence Initiative planning staff, head of the Department for the Promotion of Research, and managing director of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study.
“It was an honour and pleasure to guide and help shape UTN during its exciting first years following its establishment. Now I am looking forward to taking up a new challenge at the Humboldt Foundation. I hope to build lasting bridges between research, political decision-makers and society there as well.”
He was the provost of the University of Bayreuth from 2011 until 2021. During his tenure as provost, he dealt with numerous challenging tasks such as the establishment of an additional Faculty of Life Sciences at the university’s new campus in Kulmbach that opened in 2019. In 2021 he became Kanzler and member of the Founding Executive Board of the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN) which is responsible for developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy for the development of the recently founded university.
“It was an honour and pleasure to guide and help shape UTN during its exciting first years following its establishment. Now I am looking forward to taking up a new challenge at the Humboldt Foundation. I hope to build lasting bridges between research, political decision-makers and society there as well”, said Markus Zanner.
Thomas Hesse has been managing the Foundation’s day-to-day operations on an interim basis since its long-time secretary general Enno Aufderheide retired on 1 April 2024. The secretary general is appointed by the Board of Trustees.
The work of the Humboldt Foundation is financed primarily through public funding. Its funding providers include the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, and the European Union.
Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 61 Nobel Prize winners.