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Karl-Theodor Sturm obtained his PhD 1989 from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg under the supervision of Heinz Bauer. Visiting and research positions led him to the universities of Stanford, Zurich, and Bonn as well as to the MPI Leipzig. In 1994, he was awarded a Heisenberg fellowship of the DFG. Since 1997, he is a professor for mathematics at the University of Bonn.
From 2012 – 2019, he was the Spokesperson of the Excellence Cluster Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. He is also PI of the Collaborative Research Center 1060 “The Mathematics of Emerging Effects” at the University of Bonn, funded since 2013. Before that, from 2002 – 2012, he was Vice-Spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center 611 “Singular Phenomena and Scaling in Mathematical Models”.
The focus of his research is in Stochastic and Geometric Analysis. He gained particular attention with his work on “Analysis on local Dirichlet spaces” as well as with his pioneering work on synthetic Ricci bounds for metric measure spaces.
In 2016, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his research project “Metric measure spaces and Ricci curvature – analytic, geometric, and probabilistic challenges”.