After 25 years of commitment in teaching and research at Ulm University Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam went into well-deserved retirement in October 2014. From its founding in 1990 until September 2014 he was leading the Institute of Databases and Information Systems as its director. In this context, he was one of the pioneers who helped to build up the young Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science in the early 1990s. During his long research career Prof. Dadam did considerable and multiply rewarded research in the area of Database Management Systems as well as Process-aware Information Systems. In the following you may have a look at Prof. Dadam's life career.

Prof. em. Dr. Peter Dadam was appointed professor for computer science at the Faculty for Engeneering and Computer Science, Ulm University in 1990. Until September 2014 he was the director of the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS). Prior to his academic career, he led the department "Advanced Information Management" at the IBM Reseach Center in Heidelberg. In his department, many features of today's (object-)relational database systems (e.g., nested tables, user-defined datatypes/functions, lists or Client-side object cache) were developed and implemented in prototypes.

Since the early 1990s, Peter Dadam focused his attention on process technologies resp. process-oriented information systems and therefore closely collaborated with Manfred Reichert. In doing so, the research field of adaptive process management systems was pioneered by them through their fundamental research results (see ADEPT). Consequently, these results were rewarded, i.a., by the doIT-Forschungs-Award of the German state Landes Baden-Württemberg, the "Merckle-Forschungspreis", the "Innovationspreis-IT" as well as several Best Paper Awards (i.a., <link en in dbis single-news article auszeichnung-fuer-dbis-forscher-bpm-test-of-time-award-2013.html _blank external-link-new-window>BPM Test of Time Award). The process management system ADEPT, developed based on the conducted research, is still one of the most powerful systems in this software category. For instance the system is used in many international research projects and it is now further maintained, developed and advertised in a dedicated spinoff called AristaFlow.

Peter Dadam is author resp. co-author of more than 200 scientific publications, he is a member of various editorial boards of prestigious journals as well as acting as a consultant and external reviewer. Additionally, he also holds several positions with Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI; German computer science association) and he is also rewarded as a GI Fellow.