Dr. Jan H. R. Woerner grew up on the north coast of Germany in a little town of about 6,000 people. The husband of a wonderful wife and father of four children has been engaged in numerous IT projects in various industry sectors, including the automotive industry, healthcare, energy utilities, the retail industry, event management, hotel management, and logistics. Since receiving his doctorate degree in 2005 from the University of Karlsruhe, he has been teaching and training students in UML and industry-scale software development. His doctoral research culminated in a dissertation in applied computer science on software supported co-operative engineering within plant production. He has served with several SMEs and large-scale enterprises during his professional career and leverages his industry experience in the classroom.
In addition to his fundamental experience in agile software development, software architecture, data analysis, integration and IT infrastructure he has a strong background in interdisciplinary team leadership theory and practice. To further develop his leadership skills, he recently became a master’s student in leadership – adopting the findings and applying the knowledge gained to his daily activities. Jan has been teaching at ORU since the fall of 2020 and was the only person from Germany that got a new university work visa in that year. He primarily teaches applied computer science but also supervises a COVID-19 and SARS-Cov-2 related undergraduate research group. He has frequently published articles in scientific and applied computer science journals and books.