Welcome, Professor Sebastian Werner

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

I studied at the Technische Universität Berlin, where I joined Professor Stefan Tai’s Chair of Information Systems Engineering in 2017 and worked in both research and teaching before earning my Ph.D. in 2023. From 2024 to 2025, I had the opportunity to serve as an interim professor at the University of Hamburg, where I headed the Software Engineering and Construction Methods research group – a position previously held by the late Professors Matthias Riebisch and André van Hoorn. This experience showed me that I truly enjoy the role of professor. This makes it especially exciting for me to now begin my tenure-track professorship in Information Systems Engineering at TUM.

What are your main areas of research?

My research focuses on the quality-oriented engineering and operation of cloud-native information systems. For several years now, my focus has been on their sustainability. I investigate how design decisions affect energy consumption and emissions, and I seek solutions that reduce both without compromising other quality attributes such as performance or cost. In doing so, I consider the entire lifecycle, from design to operation, with a particular focus on the interplay between applications, platforms and organizations. With quality characteristics this complex, improvements rarely come from adjusting a single parameter but rather arise from the interaction of various technical and organizational measures. With the increasing use of AI systems, this issue is becoming even more urgent.

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

In my new position, I’m looking forward to expanding my research on the sustainability of information systems. TUM provides an excellent environment for doing so, and particularly at the TUM School of Computation, Information, and Technology (CIT), there are many colleagues with whom I see great potential for collaborative research. In addition, TUM offers many opportunities to collaborate with researchers from other disciplines on this topic. Munich’s strong industrial ecosystem also provides excellent opportunities to translate our research into practice.

However, it is particularly important to me to build a strong team of curious and outstanding doctoral students, to guide them in their research projects and to develop new ideas together. And, of course, I want to inspire students to consider sustainability when designing future software systems.

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

One insight I keep coming back to is that technical improvements alone are often not enough. You can come up with excellent ideas for more efficient architectures, better source code or more sustainable infrastructure. However, such ideas only scale when they align with the people and organizations that design and operate the systems on a daily basis. If developers and architects don’t trust a solution or if it doesn’t fit into their workflow, it is unlikely to be adopted in practice. That is why I try to conduct research that is as practice-oriented as possible and to test solutions in collaboration with industry.

What is at the top of your personal bucket list?     

I don’t have a set bucket list, but I used to enjoy rock climbing and hope that living so close to the mountains will help me take up this hobby again. I’d also love to see the famous Eisbach wave someday, and who knows, maybe even give it a try myself.

Other than that, I would obviously like to really get to know Munich and the surrounding area. One thing my partner and I are looking forward to is exploring the restaurants in Munich’s different neighborhoods, one by one.