Ursula Gather


Ursula Gather is a German statistician and academic administrator. From 2008 to 2020, she was rector of TU Dortmund University. Since 2013, Gather has been chairwoman of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation.

Early life and education

Gather is originally from Mönchengladbach. She studied mathematics at RWTH Aachen University, earning a doctorate there in 1979 and her habilitation in 1984. Her doctoral dissertation concerned the detection of outliers and robustness of statistical methods against outliers; it was supervised by.

Career

After working at RWTH Aachen University as an assistant beginning in 1976, Gather became a professor at the University of Iowa in 1985, but returned to Germany in 1986 as a professor in the faculty of statistics at the Technical University of Dortmund, where she was chair for mathematical statistics and industrial applications. She was dean of the faculty from 1991 to 1994, and became rector at TU Dortmund in 2008 following the resignation of Eberhard Becker.
Since 2013 Gather has been chairing the board of trustees of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, succeeding Berthold Beitz. The foundation owns a major stake in the ThyssenKrupp conglomerate. Since 2016, she has been a member of the senate of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Other activities

Corporate boards

The festschrift Robustness and Complex Data Structures: Festschrift in Honour of Ursula Gather was published in honor of Gather's 60th birthday in 2013. In 2015, she received an honorary doctorate from the Łódź University of Technology. Furthermore, Gather was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2018.