More about Prof. Dr. Rainer Lenz
Prof. Dr. Rainer Lenz earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in 2002, as a fellow of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Graduate Funding Program, with a dissertation on Universal Algebra and Many-Valued Logic. Following this, he worked at the Federal Statistical Office of Germany and held various teaching positions until he accepted a professorship in "Mathematics and Computer Science" at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz in 2006. He also served as a visiting professor for Financial Decision Analysis at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2009 before receiving another professorship at the HTW Saarland in 2010. There, he was appointed to lead the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Applied Statistics, which soon joined the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain). In 2010, he habilitated at the Statistical Faculty of TU Dortmund on the topic “Methods of Statistical Disclosure Control and Their Protective Effects” and has since been offering regular courses and case studies on applied statistics as a private lecturer. In 2016, he accepted a professorship in Statistics and Data Science at TH Köln.
His research focuses on applied statistics and combinatorial optimization. Specifically, in the context of data privacy and anonymization of research data, he operates at the intersection between science and data holders, having adopted both perspectives over the years. In addition to publishing scientific studies, he advises official data holders such as Federal Statistical Office of Germany and Eurostat as a national expert and several private sector companies on issues related to data integration, data anonymization, and the implementation of the GDPR in everyday business. Furthermore, he is regularly appointed as a reviewer for several international journals. Over the past 20 years, he has participated in numerous national and international research projects on data privacy in various roles as a researcher, leader, consultant, and collaborator.