Klaus Dittrich

Klaus R. Dittrich, who lived from 30 December 1950 to 20 November 2007, was a German computer scientist. After his high school graduation at Gymnasium Münchberg he studied at the University of Karlsruhe, where he received his diploma degree in computer science, and he earned his PhD there in 1982 at the Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization. He headed the database department of the Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe from 1985 to 1989. From 1989 he was a professor of computer science at the University of Zurich and head of its Database Technology Research Group, and he took sabbatical leaves at Stanford University and Hewlett Packard Labs in 1996 and at the Università degli Studi di Milano and at Boeing in 2002; in 1999 he was a guest professor at Aalborg University.