Dr. Muriel Helbig is president of the Technische Hochschule Lübeck and has served as vice president of the DAAD since 1 January 2020.
She was born in Washington, DC in 1975 and grew up in Germany, Lebanon and the USA before she began studying psychology at the University of Potsdam in 1994. She subsequently completed her doctorate in an international German Research Foundation (DFG) research training group at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (2006). Her professional stations led her via graduate funding at the University of Jena (2006-2009) to the Bauhaus University of Weimar, where she was Head of International Relations (2009-2014).

Dr Jens Brandenburg has been Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of Education and Research since December 2021.
He has been a member of the German Bundestag from the Rhine-Neckar constituency since 2017. For the parliamentary group of the Free Democrats, he was spokesperson for studies, vocational training and lifelong learning as well as spokesperson for LGBTI in the 19th legislative period. In addition, he was the representative of his parliamentary group in the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment as well as in the Enquete Commission "Vocational Training in the Digital World of Work". He chaired the Education and Research Working Group of his parliamentary group.

At the University of Mannheim, he completed a B.A. degree in political science and economics (2008) and an M.A. degree in political science (2010). He completed his doctorate in 2015 at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim.

Photo: Jens Brandenburg/ Stephanie Trenz