JÜRGEN KURTHS studied mathematics at the University of Rostock. He received his Ph.D.degree from the GDR Academy of Sciences. He was a Full Professor at the University of Potsdam, from 1994 to 2008. He has been a Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Chair of the Research Domain Complexity Science of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, since 2008.
He has published more than 600 articles that are cited more than 56,000 times (H-index: 109). His primary research interests include synchronization, complex networks, and time series analysis and their applications in Earth Sciences, Physiology, engineering, and others. He has found new basic phenomena such as phase and lag synchronization in chaotic systems, and coherence resonance and has made basic contributions to synchronization in complex networks and its stability, in particular, the concept of basin stability and its application to the functionality of modern power grids and has developed new techniques for causality analysis and applied this to climate networks leading to a substantially better prediction of extreme climate events.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Network Science Society, and a member of the Academia Europaea. He received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2005 and 2021, the Richardson award from the European Geoscience Union in 2013, and the 1000 Talent award for foreign experts (China) in 2015. He got eight Honory Doctorates and Honorary Professors.
He is Editor-in-chief of CHAOS – A Journal of Nonlinear Science and editor of about 10 further journals, such as Europ. Physics Lett., Nonlinear Dynamics etc.