Kai Purnhagen is Professor for Food Law at Campus Kulmbach

Already in April 2020, the first appointment procedure for the newly founded Faculty VII on Kulmbach campus had been successfully completed. Prof. Dr. Kai Purnhagen, an acknowledged expert in the field of international food law, accepted his appointment to the first professorship for food law in Germany, and took up his duties at the University of Bayreuth on 1 July 2020. Purnhagen teaches and conducts research on European law and international commercial law, and is particularly interested in their interdisciplinary relationships.

Purnhagen studied law in Giessen and subsequently completed his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During his doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence, he worked on systematisation as a method of integration and risk regulation law at the EU level. Before being appointed to the University of Bayreuth, he taught and researched at numerous universities, including the London School of Economics and Political Science, Wageningen University & Research, and LMU (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich).

"Food law is by its very nature international and interdisciplinary. Here, developments have been anticipated and methods developed which have gone on to be adopted as models for other fields of law. This is also the case with interdisciplinarity. In food law, interdisciplinarity is already well advanced even in written law. This type of innovative, interdisciplinary, international, and solution-oriented research and teaching," says Purnhagen, "paves the way for mastering the great challenges of our time: climate change, global hunger, and worldwide malnutrition. Being able to work on these issues in a way never before seen in Germany is an essential part of the newly created professorship on the Kulmbach campus. Here, the international approaches of our departmental structure are combined with the proven system of German universities. In this way, we combine the best of both worlds! In short, the Kulmbach campus will create optimal conditions for research and teaching in order to be able to cope with the major problems of our time. Who would not want to be part of such a project?"