short bio

Hans-Paul Schwefel studied Aero- and Space-Technology at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB). Before and after receiving his engineer diploma in 1965 he worked at the Hermann-Föttinger-Institute of Hydrodynamics, from 1967 to 1970 at an industrial research institute, and from 1971 to 1975 again at the TUB, from where he got his Dr.-Ing. degree in 1975. Coherent during that period at Berlin was the development of a new experimental and later on also numerical optimization method called 'Evolutionsstrategie'. From 1976 to 1985 he acted as senior research fellow at the Research Centre (KFA) Jülich, where he was head of a computer aided planning tools group. Since 1985 until he was pensioned in 2006 he was holder of a Chair for Systems Analysis (now Algorithm Engineering) at the (now Technical) University of Dortmund, Department of (now Faculty for) Computer Science.

In 1990 he was co-founder of the international conference series on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN), which has been held biennially ever since. He acted as dean of the faculty, as spokesman of the collaborative research center on computational intelligence (SFB 531), as co-founder and president of the Informatics Centre Dortmund (ICD), and also as pro-rector for research at the university. He has been member of the editorial boards of three journals and advisory board member of two book series in the field of Evolutionary respective Natural Computation. His publication list comprises more than 160 entries.

In 2002 he got an Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award from the IEEE Neural Networks Society, later renamed IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. As Senior Member since 2005, he was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE in 2007. In the same year The University of Birmingham admitted him to the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa. An IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award was awarded to Hans-Paul Schwefel in the year 2011.

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