Jürgen Kriwet, Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Geol. Dr.

Jürgen Kriwet was born in southern Germany where he attended elementary and secondary schools. After his military service as paramedic with the mountain infantry, he studied Geology and Palaeontology at the Department of Earth Sciences of the Free University of Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in biology from the Humboldt University Berlin in 2001 and the Venia legendi (‘Habilitation’) in Palaeobiology in 2009 from the Free University of Berlin. From 2001, he was first a post-doctoral scholar (Marie Curie Fellow) in the research group of Prof. M.J. Benton at the University of Bristol (UK) and then a postdoctoral researcher (DFG, own position) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. From 2005 – 2008 he was acting curator of fossil fishes at the Museum of Natural History Berlin before he joined the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart to become curator of fossil amphibians and reptiles and subsequently also head of this section. From 2009 to 2010 he was honoured as Research Associate at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol (UK).

Since 2010, he has been Full Professor and Chair for Palaeobiology with special focus on vertebrates at the University of Vienna. His group focuses predominantly on evolutionary and palaeobiological aspects of marine vertebrates employing state-of-the-art methodological approaches and integrating living and fossil organisms, knowledge of their evolutionary relationships and past diversity patterns, evolutionary developmental biology, and statistic applications to provide a holistic understanding of their evolutionary history.

He served as Head of Department (2011, 2016-2018) and as Vice Dean (2011-2016) of the Faculty for Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy. From the beginning he participated in many national and international commissions. Currently, he is member of the IT Advisory Board, Study Conference, Faculty Conference and the Dissertation Advisory Board of the University of Vienna, and acts as coordinator for the scientific collections of the faculty. Since 2019, he also is member of the steering committee of the Doctoral School of Ecology and Evolution. In 2014-2015 he was member of the evaluation panel for the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and in 2015, 2020 and 2021 for the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Some of his major achievements at the University of Vienna were to plan and organise the reconstruction of the entire infrastructure and the offices of the faculty as vice dean. He also founded a very active research group (Evolutionary Morphology Research Group, www.evomorg.org) and set up high-end micro-computed tomography and 3D digital microscopy laboratories with a high performance-computing infrastructure for image data processing, micro- and macro-anatomical laboratories, and fish culture facilities. He published almost 180 scientific papers and the media covered many of the research results of his group. Furthermore, he has organized or co-organized nine symposia and conferences and presented research results at more than 80 conferences up to now. Over the years, he established successful collaborations with colleagues from Italy, UK, Spain, the USA, Argentina, Chile and China that resulted in many joined-papers in leading journals. He also is member of the editorial team of several leading journals in his research discipline (e.g., Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Frontiers in Paleontology, Cretaceous Research, Plos One, Diversity, PalZ).