Professor Stefan Pickl is a founding member of the SENS Research Center, Professor of Operations Research and a member of the COMTESSA Research Group.

The COMTESSA Research Group (Core Competence Center for Operations Research, Management Tenacity Experiments, Safety & Security ALLIANCE) around Professor Stefan Pickl focuses on safety and security as well as awareness. In the context of IT-based process optimization, the members have spent 15 years developing and researching ways to handle comprehensive sensor data and how to best use sensors in various security-relevant areas and experimental environments. This work focuses primarily on critical infrastructure as well as on conceptual designs and optimization of integrated early warning systems.

Professor Pickl is the deputy chairman of the executive board of the German Committee for Disaster Reduction (DKKV) and head of the advisory board of the German Society for Operations Research (GOR). He works closely with the EU’s Joint Research Center (JRC) and is a member of the task force on energy security at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey. In this context, he is involved in CENETIX, the Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation at NPS. Since 2008, his group has been involved in live experiments in the Bay Area of San Francisco, at Camp Roberts, in Souda Bay as well as in central critical infrastructures in Germany. Members of the group have carried out more than 50 national and international projects. Professor Pickl is involved in an ongoing EU project aimed at characterizing and analyzing hybrid threats, which cooperates closely with the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats to study and develop new data-based optimization procedures.

Professor Pickl is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, where he oversaw the establishment of an analytics center as part of IT-based decision-making support and process optimization.