Prof. Dr. Anne Otto will be Professor of "Higher Education and the Labor Market" at the Department of Economics at the University of Kassel from April 2026 and is also a researcher at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB).

In recent years, Prof. Dr. Anne Otto (IAB) has cooperated with INCHER in many projects, currently she is involved - together with Prof. Dr. Guido Bünstorf,Dr. Matthias Hügel, Dr. Johannes König and Noah Weisswange - in the project "International Mobility as Strategy and Result in National Excellence Competition", which is part of the DFG research group"Multiple Competition in the Higher Education System - Internationalization and International Comparison".

With the appointment of Prof. Dr. Anne Otto to the S-Professorship for "Higher Education and the Labor Market", the already proven cooperation between the University of Kassel and the IAB is to be further intensified. As a member of the INCHER Board of Directors, she will in future be involved in fundamental decisions affecting INCHER.

Anne Otto summarizes her research focus in the context of the new professorship as follows:

"Career paths and decisions of doctoral candidates and doctoral graduates within and outside the university and science system - important to me are, for example, questions of labor market transitions after the doctorate and the trade-off for postdocs in remaining in academia versus the private sector. I am investigating whether career decisions during and after the doctorate are linked to national and international mobility, including moving away from the university region and starting a career at another university.
I am also working on the transformation of regional labor markets and the spatial mobility of workers in Germany."

She will introduce current topics from labour market research and policy into teaching at the Department of Economics - including the digitalization of the world of work and sustainability.

We are delighted about the new professorship and look forward to working with her!