Dagmar Oertel will leave the HIU in mid-September to take on new professional challenges as Secretary General of the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Since January 1, 2012, she has served as Managing Director and played a key role in creating an infrastructure at the HIU that enables innovative research. The institute was launched in a very short time in 2011 and has grown considerably to this day. At Dagmar Oertel, all organizational threads ran together to make this process successful. She established an administration with 14 employees in the areas of personnel, finance, public relations, IT and technology. Since the beginning of her career at HIU, she has coordinated the construction of the new institute building on the part of HIU, which was constructed in October 2014 by the state of Baden-Württemberg with a volume of 12 million euros and 2,400 square meters. Her time as managing director also saw the inauguration of the solar power storage system in spring 2015, which combines modern high-performance batteries with intelligent control for grid-conserving feed-in.
Dagmar Oertel studied chemistry and earned her doctorate in economics and worked at the Office for Technology Assessment of the German Bundestag for more than ten years. In 2007, she moved to Karlsruhe and accompanied the founding process of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where she was deputy head of the Strategy, Structure and Development Planning department in the KIT presidential staff from 2009.