Curriculum Vitae
Jürgen Renn is Founding Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology. He heads the Department Structural Changes of the Technosphere and is Acting Head of the Department of Archaeology.
Born in Moers in 1956. 1983 Diploma in Physics at the Free University of Berlin; 1987 Doctorate in Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin. From 1986-1992 Jürgen Renn was a staff member and co-editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein; 1989-1992 Assistant, later Associate Professor of Physics, Philosophy, History of Science and Philosophy of Science at Boston University; 1993 Simon Silverman Visiting Professor in the History of Science at Tel Aviv University; 1993-1994 Visiting Professor of Philosophy at ETH Zurich. In 1994, he founded the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and headed the Department of Structural Change in Knowledge Systems until 2023. Honorary professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1996. Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2005; Honorary Professor of the History of Science at Freie Universität Berlin since 2006. In 2019 he was elected Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute and in 2021 Foreign Associate in the Class for Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte in Venice.
In 2022, he was appointed Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, which is based on a concept that emerged from his research on the Anthropocene conducted jointly with a global research network.