Wismar: Prof. Dr. Wiegand-Hoffmeister again Rector of the university!

Wismar: Prof. Dr. Wiegand-Hoffmeister again Rector of the university!

Wismar, Deutschland - On July 10, 2025, Prof. Dr. jur. Bodo Wiegand-Hoffmeister again elected Rector of the Wismar University of Applied Sciences. This election took place at the session of the V. extended Senate, and Wiegand Hoffmeister successfully prevailed against an external applicant. His model for the future is clear: from February 1, 2026, he will be in office for another six years and will develop the university in order to keep it competitive. "I would like to thank the members of the extended Senate for the trust," he said after the election and is optimistic about the upcoming challenges.

A look at his career shows that Wiegand Hoffmeister not only strives for a return to the top of the university, but also has a solid foundation in the academic and political landscape. Born in Essen, he studied law and philosophy at the Ruhr University Bochum and in 1991 obtained the first state examination in Düsseldorf. After several stations, including as a research assistant and speaker of the SPD parliamentary group Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, he completed his doctorate in 2000 and was then appointed to the Faculty of Economics at the Wismar University of Economics.

successful leadership

not to forget Wiegand Hoffmeister's previous performance as a rector: since 2014 he has headed the university and was particularly characterized by his successful leadership during the pandemic. He built up intensive cooperation with the state government in order to better use Wings GmbH's income. His role as Chairman of the State Conference of Rectors Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has been showing his influence and networking within the university area since March 2023.

In his new term, the rector plans to further expand the Wismar University of Applied Sciences not only as an educational institution, but also as an innovation engine. A future -oriented example is the use of Matomo for the statistical web analysis that the university uses to improve the user experience of your website. The decisive advantages here are the anonymization of the collected data and the clear way for users to determine their data protection settings themselves. According to the university, further details on the collected impressions on the data protection page are available so that there is transparency where personal data is processed.

data protection in university system

Wiegand Hoffmeister also occurs at a time when the topic of data protection for educational institutions is of the highest relevance. Since the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU in May 2018, universities have to observe strict requirements for the processing of personal data. These regulations apply to both science and administrative institutions and include information about students and employees, personal circumstances and their performance. Universities are therefore required to create a clear legal framework for this data processing.

e-learning and the evaluation of data play an increasingly important role, which brings additional challenges for data protection. The responsibility for data processing lies not only with the institutions themselves, but also with staff and the students. As part of these legal requirements, the universities are encouraged to make their data processing processes transparent and secure in order to avoid possible image damage through data protection violations.

Prof. Dr. Bodo Wiegand-Hoffmeister is faced with both exciting and challenging further term, which he would like to design with a clear focus on the further development of the university and the well-being of the students.