Simon Stier | Head of Digital Transformation
Fraunhofer ISC

I started my carrier studying material science at JMU Würzburg in 2011. During the first semesters I recognized in the study plan a (total) lack of computer science and automation as important modern tools for research. For that reason I decided to join the B.Sc. program in computer science as well, finally ending up with a M.Sc. in both Material and Computer Science in 2016. I continued with a PhD in the interdisciplinary field of sensor materials, IoT and robots. After graduating in 2020 I became Head of Digital Transformation at Fraunhofer ISC, were my mission is to acceleration material science with computational and automation approaches. The focus of me and my team lies in particular on semantic Interoperability between equipment, data and code. For this purpose we develop an Open Source ecosystem called OpenSemanticLab which combines existing industry standards and AI agents in order to empower users to make use of semantic technologies and ontologies without even recognizing it. Finally, since I love programming so much, I also work as a freelance software developer..