Prof. Oliver Ibert is new Director of IRS

IRS has a new director. On June 24th, Brandenburg's minister of science, research and culture, Dr. Martina Münch, appointed the economic geographer Prof. Oliver Ibert to the professorship in Socio-Spatial Transformation at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. This professorship and the position of IRS director are linked through a joint appointment by BTU and IRS. Ibert took office on July 1st.

Oliver Ibert is head of the research former department „Dynamics of Economic Spaces“ at IRS. From 2009 to 2019 he was professor of Economic Geography at Freie Universität Berlin. In 1991 he started to study the topics Geography (major), German Literature and Political Sciences (both minor) at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and obtained his master’s degree in 1997. In 2002 he acquired his PhD at the University of Oldenburg and in 2009 he completed his post-doctoral habilitation thesis at the University of Bonn.

In summer 2014 Oliver Ibert was a visiting professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Toronto and in autumn 2018 he was a Halsworth Visiting Professor at the Department of Geography at Manchester University. He is a member of the editorial board of Palgrave Communications and acts as a spokesperson of the working group “Concepts of Crisis” as a part of the Leibniz Research Alliance “Crises in a globalized world”.