Prof. Dr. Franz X. Bogner is Emeritus of Honour of the University of Bayreuth

From 2004 to 2024, Bogner held the Chair of Didactics of Biology at the University of Bayreuth. At the Center for the Promotion of Mathematics and Science Education (Z-MNU) at the University of Bayreuth, which Bogner has headed as Managing Director since the beginning, he mostly implemented international research projects in the key areas of environmental education and STEM teaching.

Bogner plays a particularly important role internationally in the research field of didactics: he has been an Affiliate Research Scientist at the University of Arizona, USA, since 2018. Since 2020, he has also been a visiting professor at the Universidad de Ciencias Pedagógicas in Havana, Cuba, where he is primarily involved in STEM teaching research at the Alexander Humboldt Center located there.

Last year, he received the "NARST Distinguished Contributions through Research Award", the most important prize in STEM didactics, and was the first German-speaking biology didactician to receive this award in more than 90 years. The award recognizes researchers who have made significant contributions to science education for at least two decades after their doctorate, such as an international leadership role in STEM research or internationally highly cited publications. He also raised enormous third-party funding for his research in Bayreuth - from the EU, but also from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) - and at the same time secured funding for more than three dozen doctoral positions.

He has now been appointed Emeritus of Honour for life due to his outstanding commitment to the University of Bayreuth and beyond. This means that he will continue to be involved in tasks at the University after his retirement and will act in an advisory capacity. The University of Bayreuth will thus benefit from Bogner's many years of experience.

"The appointment as Emeritus of Honour offers a great framework for continuing research, as three EU projects are currently still running under the umbrella of the Z-MNU," he says. The projects are about "AI in the STEM classroom", "Eco-Schools" and new "Learning concepts on the topic of sustainability". "I'm most looking forward to continuing to support the university with its internationalization strategy. This is where the strengths of the last 30 years of research since my habilitation in the 1990s and my experience as a visiting professor come into play," says Bogner.