71 Notable alumni of Ruhr University Bochum

Anthony F.J. Moffat is an emeritus professor of astronomy at the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was appointed as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2001. Moffat's research focuses on massive stars (Wolf-Rayet stars in particular), stellar winds, binary stars, as well as the structure and dynamics of star formation regions and galaxies.

Katharina Kohse-Höinghaus is a German chemist.

Hans Joachim Schliep was a German Lutheran theologian, pastor and author. From 1990 to 1999 he was director of the Amt für Gemeindedienst (English: Office for Community Service, since 2002 Haus kirchlicher Dienste of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover), and by May 2000 the commissioner for the environment (German: Umweltbeauftragter) of the Church of Hanover and the Confederation of Protestant...

Kevin Werdelmann, also known by his stage name Slowtide, is a German songwriter and musician.

Nina D. Berova is a Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. She is recognised as a world leader in stereochemistry and chiroptical spectroscopy. Her contributions include the development of porphyrin tweezers. She was the 2007 winner of the Società Chimica Italiana Chirality Medal.

Barbara Lison is a German librarian. She has led the Bremen public library service for thirty years. She was President of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) from 2021 to 2023 stressing the topics sustainability, open-access and fair copyright.

Ursula "Ulla" Burchardt is a German politician and member of the SPD.

Sylvie Paycha is a French mathematician and mathematical physicist working in operator theory as a professor at the University of Potsdam. She has chaired both European Women in Mathematics and L'association femmes et mathématiques.

Michael Bach is a German scientist who researches ophthalmology, clinical electroencephalography, clinical electroretinography, visual acuity testing, and visual perception. Bach is the creator of website Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena, which began receiving over two million hits a day in 2005.

Klaus Rohde is a German biologist and parasitologist at the University of New England (UNE), Australia. He is known particularly for his work on marine parasitology, evolutionary ecology, zoogeography, phylogeny, and ultrastructure of lower invertebrates.

Michael Bruse is a German geographer and professor for geoinformatics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He specializes in research on urban microclimate/climatology with a methodical focus on numerical simulation. Besides his scientific work he developed the micro-climate model ENVI-met. and is founder of the company ENVI-met GmbH. ENVI-met is a holistic three-dimensional non-hydrostatic model for the simulation of surface-plant-air interactions...

Frank Leymann is a German computer scientist and mathematician. He is professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and director and founder of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS).

Bernhard H. Bayerlein is a German professor, historian and honorary senior researcher at the Ruhr-University Bochum. His work includes the study of transnational communism, the history of social, political and cultural movements, and of the labour movement, as well as Portuguese and Spanish studies and comparative politics, including semi-presidentialism.

Gabriele Klein is a sociologist, dance theorist and professor at the University of Hamburg.

Wolfgang Leidhold is a German political scientist, philosopher and artist. He works as a full professor at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne, with a focus on political theory and the history of ideas. The scope of his work ranges from the Paleolithic to the present day. Since the 1980s he has been...

Hans-Wolfgang Arndt is a German lawyer, professor for tax law and former president (rector) of the University of Mannheim from 2001 to 2012. Previously he was professor for tax law at the Department für Rechtswissenschaften (department of law) at the University of Konstanz.

Claudia Lux is a German librarian and the Member of the National Committee of International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

Christine Lang is a German microbiologist and entrepreneur. She is an adjunct professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and teaches genetics in biotechnology at Technische Universität Berlin.

Marc Degens is a German novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and musician.

Gerhard Klimeck is a German-American scientist and author in the field of nanotechnology. He is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Benedikt Jahnel is a German jazz pianist, composer, bandleader and mathematician.

Dietrich Braess is a German mathematician. He is known for Braess's paradox, which deals with traffic equilibrium. Braess's focus has centered on numerical treatment of elliptical differential equations and nonlinear approximation theories.

Wolfgang Ernst is a German media theorist. He is Professor for Media Theories at Humboldt University of Berlin and a major exponent of media archaeology as a method of scholarly inquiry.

Jens Peter Seipenbusch is a German politician and physicist who was leader of the Pirate Party Germany.

Elisabeth Niggemann is a German librarian specializing in the digitization of cultural heritage resources. From 1999 to 2019, she served as the director general of the German National Library.

Irmtrud Wojak is a German historian. From the end of March 2009 until November 2011, she was the founding director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.

René Röspel is a German biologist and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as a member of the Bundestag from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1998 to 2021.

Kai Henrik Twilfer is a German merchant and author.

Jens Geier is a German politician who has been serving as a member of the European Parliament since 2009. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, part of the Party of European Socialists.

Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).

Ralf Brauksiepe is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Between 1998 and 2018, he served as a member of the Bundestag.

Katharina Müller is a retired German competitive ice dancer. With her skating partner Tim Dieck, she is a two-time German national champion and has won many senior international medals, including two silver medals on the ISU Challenger Series and three gold medals at the German NRW Trophy. They have represented Germany at the European and World championships.

Dagmar Freitag is a German teacher and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as a member of the Bundestag from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1994 to 2021.

Sebastian Siebrecht is a German chess grandmaster. He earned the FIDE master title in 1993, followed by the International Master title in 1996. He was awarded the grandmaster title in 2008 after achieving five norms.

Michael Ristow is a German medical researcher who has published influential articles on biochemical aspects of mitochondrial metabolism and particularly the possibly health-promoting role of reactive oxygen species in diseases like type 2 diabetes, obesity and cancer, as well as general aging due to a process called mitohormesis.

Daniel Jasinski is a male discus thrower from Germany. He won the Olympic bronze medal in 2016. It was an unexpected first medal in a major championship.

Andreas Zick is a professor of Socialization and Conflict Research at Faculty of Education Science, Bielefeld University.

Andrew John Ullmann is a German physician and politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who served as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Bavaria from 2017 to 2025.

Joachim Erwin was a German politician and the Mayor of Düsseldorf from 1999 until his death in 2008. He was born in Stadtroda, Thuringia, Germany.

Kai Gehring is a German politician of the Green Party who served as a Member of the German Parliament from 2005 to 2025.

Wolfgang Kubin is a German poet, essayist, sinologist and translator of literary works. He is the former director of the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. Kubin has frequently been a guest professor at universities in China, for instance at Beijing Foreign Studies University, but also in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Jerusalem. Since 1989,...

Jochen Borchert is a German politician and member of the CDU. He was minister of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's cabinet from 1993 to 1998. From 1980 to 2009 he was a member of the Bundestag.

Matthias Hauer is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2013.

Sonja Zekri is a German journalist and author. Her topics are Near East, Eastern Europe, culture and religion, among others.

Oliver Wittke is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Max Lucks is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag in the 20th Bundestag that has been elected in the German federal election on 26 September 2021. He was the spokesperson for Green Youth, the youth organisation of Alliance 90/The Greens, from October 2017 to November 2019. On 23 February...

Jamiri is a German comics artists.

Sonja Greinacher, also known as Sunny Greinacher, is a German basketball player. She represented Germany at the 2024 Summer Olympics, winning the gold medal in the 3x3 event.

Andreas Floer was a German mathematician who made seminal contributions to symplectic topology, and mathematical physics, in particular the invention of Floer homology. Floer's first pivotal contribution was a solution to a special case of Arnold's conjecture on fixed points of a symplectomorphism. Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition...

Hans-Paul Bürkner is a German management consultant, and a managing director, senior partner, and global chair emeritus of the Boston Consulting Group. Bürkner was President & CEO from 2004 to 2012, and was the firm's first European CEO.

Ali Atalan is a Kurdish-German politician of Yazidi faith. He is a former member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia with Die Linke in Germany, and the Turkish Parliament with the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

Katrin Suder is a German physicist and management consultant who served as State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Defense in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2014 to 2018.

Sadegh Tabatabaei was an Iranian writer, journalist, TV host, university professor at the University of Tehran and politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister from 1979 to 1980. He was also Deputy Minister of the Interior and oversaw the referendum on establishing an Islamic Republic in March 1979. He was Iran's Ambassador to West Germany from 1982 until 1986.

Shieh Jhy-wey is a Taiwanese politician and diplomat who is currently the Taiwanese Representative to the EU and Belgium, serving since August 2025. Previously, he served as Taiwanese Representative to Germany from 2016 to 2025, and as director-general of Government Information Office from 2007 to 2008.

Melanie Raabe is a German novelist and journalist.

Maximilian Reinelt was a German rower and physician. He won a gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics, and a silver medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics, as well as two World Championships and four European Championships. In 2016, he was awarded the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt, Germany's highest sports award.

Zdzisław Marek Krasnodębski is a Polish sociologist, social philosopher, publicist and professor at the University of Bremen (Germany), who has been a Member of the European Parliament since the 2014 election.

Sylvia Löhrmann is a German politician of the Green Party. From 2010 to 2017 she was Deputy Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and State Minister of School and Further Education.

Hartmut Neven is a German American scientist working in quantum computing, computer vision, robotics and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition and his contributions to quantum machine learning. He is currently Vice President of Engineering at Google where he leads the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which he founded in 2012.

Svenja Schulze is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has been serving as member of the German Bundestag since 2021, representing North Rhine-Westphalia.

Bernd Baumann is a German politician of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and chief whip of the AfD Group who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Hamburg since 2017.

Erwin Sellering is a German politician. He served as the 4th Minister President of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern from 2008 to 2017.

Reinhard Marx is a German Catholic prelate who has served as Archbishop of Munich and Freising since 2008. Pope Benedict XVI made him a cardinal in 2010. He is a former member of the Council of Cardinals established by Pope Francis, serving from 2013 to 2023 and is a former president of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the...

Norbert Lammert is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as the 12th president of the Bundestag from 2005 to 2017.

Gina Lückenkemper is a German track and field athlete who competes in the sprints. She is a three-time Olympian and won a bronze medal in the 4 × 100 metres relay at the 2024 Summer Olympics. Lückenkemper is also a World Championships bronze medalist, two-time European champion and World Relays silver and bronze medalist.

Gerhard Hirschfeld is a German historian and author. From 1989 to 2011, he was director of the Stuttgart-based Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte / Library of Contemporary History, and has been a professor at the Institute of History of the University of Stuttgart since 1997. In 2016 he also became a visiting professor at the Institute for International Studies, University of Wuhan...

Peter Trawny is a German philosopher and professor at the University of Wuppertal.

Gordon Kampe is a German composer and academic teacher.

Klaus Segbers is a German political scientist and professor for International Relations and East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Global Politics at Freie Universität Berlin, which offers four distinct graduate study programs designed for professionals and young leaders. His research interests include theories of international relations, transformations in...

Christian Keysers is a French and German neuroscientist.