Karl-Josef Dietz
IUBS President
Karl-Josef Dietz is based at Bielefeld University (Germany) in the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology of Plants and is President of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS). He owns a PhD in Biology, Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Würzburg (Germany) and has been a full professor at Bielefeld University since 1997. His research interest deals with the ability of plants to acclimatize to adverse environmental conditions, e.g. heavy metals, high light, salinity or low mineral nutrients in heterogeneous soil.
From 1985 to 1987, he was a researcher at Harvard University, and he has also conducted research at Sheffield University (UK), Université de Toulouse (France), Hitotsubashi University (Japan), Wellesley College (USA) and Université de Lorraine (France), among others. With over 350 publications, he is a highly cited researcher in his field, having won several research prizes, e.g. the Gay Lussac Humboldt-prize. Since 2020, he is President of German Life Science Association and is elected member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina.