November 24, 2020

At its general meeting on 20 November 2020, the trinational alliance of universities of applied sciences in the Upper Rhine metropolitan region TriRhenaTechelected Prof. Dr. Franz Quint, Vice-President for Research, Cooperation and Quality Management at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, as its new spokesperson. In this function, he succeeds Crispino Bergamaschi, President of the Northwestern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, and will join him as well as Sylvie Bégin, Director of the European School of Chemistry, Polymers and Materials in Strasbourg (ECPM) and representative of Alsace Tech, as member of the Board of Directors of the alliance.

The TriRhenaTech alliance is a trinational network of German, French, and Swiss universities, founded in 2014. The aim of this alliance is to promote European coherence through cooperation between the partner institutions in teaching, research, knowledge and technology transfer, innovation and continuing education as well as student exchange and to contribute to strengthening the Upper Rhine innovation ecosystem.

The founding members of the TriRhenaTech alliance were the Alsace Tech network of the 14 Alsatian Grandes Ecoles (11,000 students) for France, the universities of applied sciences in Karlsruhe (8,100 students), Offenburg (4,500 students) and Furtwangen (6,400 students) for Germany and the Northwestern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences FHNW (12,400 students) for Switzerland. Five years after the signing of this cooperation agreement, the alliance also includes the University of Kaiserslautern (6,200 students), the DHBW Lörrach (2,000 students) and the University of Trier (8,000 students).

"As a European model region, our 'Strategy 2030' in the trinational metropolitan region of the Upper Rhine has set itself the goal of jointly developing the excellence of business and science," says Prof. Dr. Franz Quint. "TriRhenaTech, as an alliance of the technology-oriented universities of applied sciences from Alsace, Northwest Switzerland, Southern Palatinate and Baden, is making valuable contributions here at the interface between science and industry, and also in the cross-border transfer of technology. The conference 'Upper-Rhine Artificial Intelligence' on the use of artificial intelligence, the recently approved Interreg project MINT-ing to increase the cross-border mobility of young academic engineers, and the student mechatronics competition 'Trinatronics' are only some of the recent activities that illustrate the versatility of the close cooperation between the universities of the Upper Rhine region.”

Franz Quint was born in 1965 in Hatzfeld in the Romanian Banat and now lives with his wife and three children in Rastatt. He passed his high school diploma in 1983 at the Nikolaus-Lenau-Lyzeum in Timişoara, Karlsruhe's Romanian twin city. In 1984, he began studying electrical engineering at the Polytechnic University there, which he continued at the University of Karlsruhe after his emigration to Germany in 1987 and completed very successfully in 1990. Until 1997, he worked as a research assistant at the University of Karlsruhe and at the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing in Karlsruhe, as well as teaching assignments at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. In 1997 he was able to complete his doctorate at the University of Karlsruhe with distinction. From 1997 to 2002 he held various management positions at Daimler-Benz Aerospace AG, Ulm (now Airbus). In March 2002, he was appointed Professor of Communications Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology  at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. In November 2017, he was elected by the university senate as Vice-President of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences.