Welcome, Professor Benjamin Nuß

What have been the most important stages in your academic career?

After completing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and information technology with a specialization in communications engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), I earned my doctorate in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) radar at the KIT’s Institute of Radio Frequency Engineering and Electronics from 2015 to 2021. After that, I took over the radar and communication systems group as a postdoc and supervised numerous doctoral students, initiated and led research proposals in the field of radar and 6G mobile communications and gave lectures.

I have been the Chair of the Automotive Forum at the European Microwave Week since 2022 and in 2023, I served as Publication Chair for the conference. Since October 2025, I have been professor of Microwave Sensors and Sensor Systems at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology (CIT).

What are your main areas of research?

Current radar sensors, especially in the automotive sector, are often significantly limited in their angular resolution because the installation space in vehicles does not allow for larger radars. I am conducting research on radar networks in which multiple sensors work together coherently. This can significantly improve environmental perception – provided that the technical requirements, such as synchronization accuracy, are met. 

In addition, the advancing digitalization offers new opportunities, but also additional challenges in the field of radar. On the one hand, radar systems with a large number of simultaneously active transmit and receive channels can be implemented much more effectively than with conventional approaches. On the other hand, however, data rates are also increasing enormously, which then have to be both temporarily stored and processed. Combining, further developing and optimizing digital radars and radar networks is one of the main research focuses of my professorship.

Moreover, the convergence of radar and communication in integrated sensing and communication systems (ISAC) in future mobile communications standards is an exciting topic that I would also like to address.

What are you most looking forward to in your new position at the TUM? 

I am looking forward to building a motivated team of doctoral students in order to advance innovative research in the field of radar and mobile communications. Because only by working together, we can develop good ideas and put them into practice. I also want to inspire eager students to take an interest in microwave technology and radar and integrate them into the future research team so that we can carry out exciting projects together with the industry and other partners.

What was your biggest “aha” moment in your scientific career?

During my bachelor’s and master’s studies, I focused mainly on communications engineering and signal processing. After switching to radio frequency (RF) engineering during my doctorate, I first had to learn a lot about the components actually used, as well as circuit and board design. This explained many effects that have to be taken into account and solved in signal processing, but whose causes are often not obvious. In the end, this combined knowledge of RF components and signal processing helped me a lot in understanding, optimizing, and further developing the overall systems.

What is at the top of your personal bucket list?     

My family and I love hiking and exploring new landscapes and countries. At some point, we definitely want to take a longer road trip through Scandinavia in a motorhome. However, the children are still too young at the moment and we don’t have a motorhome yet. But traveling and discovering new destinations are already at the top of my personal wish list – both in the surrounding area and in more distant countries.