Thomas Strothotte is a Canadian computer scientist and university administrator living in Germany. He is the Rector of the University of Regensburg in Bavaria.
Strothotte was born in 1959 in Regina, Canada and raised in Vancouver. His first degrees were taken at Simon Fraser University (a B.Sc. in Physics (1980) and an M.Sc. in Computer Science (1981)). His further graduate work was done in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart, McGill University in Montréal/Québec and the University of Waterloo/Ontario, leading to a Ph.D. in 1984.
After a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at INRIA Rocquencourt near Paris, he went to the University of Stuttgart as an Assistant Professor in 1985, earning a D.Sc. (habil) degree in Computer Science in 1989. From 1989 to 1990 he was a visiting scientist at the IBM Scientific Center in Heidelberg, working in the Software Ergonomics Department. From there he went to the Free University of Berlin in 1990 as a Professor of Computer Science.
He moved on to the University of Magdeburg in Germany in 1993, where he was the head of the Computer Graphics and Interactive Systems Laboratory. He was the Dean of his Faculty from 1994 to 1996 and again later on from 2005 to 2006. From April, 1996 until September, 1998 he was a Vice-President/Academic Planning and Budget Development of the University, from July until September, 1998 he was also President pro tem of the University. He was also the initiator and one of the scientific responsibles for the new degree programme in Computational Visualistics.
From March, 2001 to December 2002 he served as the Director of IT for the government of the State of Saxony-Anhalt.
From October, 2006 until December, 2008 he was the Rector of the University of Rostock.[1] In January, 2009 he was elected as the new Rector of the University of Regensburg in the State of Bavaria (Germany) for a four year term to begin on April 1, 2009.[2]