LERU appoints new chairman

Press release from LERU

The League of European Research Universities, a network of 20 research-intensive European universities founded in 2002, has appointed Bernd Huber, President of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, as its Chairman for the next three years. Huber took up his position last weekend at the LERU Rectors’ Assembly at the University of Lund.

“I will use my new position to strengthen LERU’s influence in structuring the European Higher Education and Research Areas so that it offers universities the optimum environment for excellent research and teaching”, Huber says, who is taking over the reins at LERU from Kari Raivio, Chancellor of the University of Helsinki. In his capacity as Chairman of LERU, Huber plans to establish closer contacts to decision-makers in national and European politics and to expand exchange with other universities.

A key goal of LERU involves intensive promotion of the strengths of basic research at European level; “Ground-breaking research achievements cannot be produced out of nowhere, but are rooted in the slow and painstaking work of basic research,” Huber emphasizes. “This is why LERU has intensively supported the foundation of the European Research Council in recent years.”

In its six-year existence LERU has developed into a sought-after council of experts and a powerful lobby for the interests of universities as institutions of higher education and top-level research. It has published numerous reports on universities and research.

Bernd Huber, born 1960 in Wuppertal, Professor for Public Finance and since 2002 President of LMU, heads one of Germany’s leading research universities with over 500 years of tradition. In 2006, it has been selected as a “university of excellence” within the Excellence Initiative, a competition launched by the German government to promote top-level university research. Among his numerous functions, Huber is also a member of the Scientific Council to the German Ministry of Finance and of the Scientific Technical Council to the Bavarian State Government.