Prof. em. Dr. Hans-Jörg Schek

Beginning in October 1988, Hans-Jörg Schek was Full Professor of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich and head of the Institute of Information Systems in the Computer Science Department. He retired end of March 2005.

Prof. Schek was born on March 7, 1940 in Hanover, Germany. He studied mathematics at the University of Stuttgart (Diploma in 1968) and earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1972 also from the University of Stuttgart. During this time he developed - together with his dissertation advisor, Professor Linkwitz - a new method for the computation of prestressed cable-net roofs and applied this method to the analysis of roofs at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. He joined the IBM Scientific Centre in Heidelberg as research member (1972-1978) and as project manager (1978-1983). There he investigated end-user-oriented interfaces and transferred increasingly into database system research with special emphasis on integration with information retrieval systems. During this period he also completed habilitation and was given venia legendi for computer methods for network computation from the University of Stuttgart in 1978. From 1983 to 1988 he was Full Professor (C4) at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The DASDBS database project that he established there is known for its contributions to data modeling (NF2 model) to multi-level transactions and to extensible spatial databases.

At the ETH Zurich he has directed the database research group. His research interests included data models, interoperability of databases and cooperation with application systems, generic, extensible object managers, and transaction management. Prof. Schek was a founder and editor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal.