Christian Kurtz

Dr. Christian Kurtz is a Postdoctoral Researcher and research project coordinator at the IT Management and Consulting working group within the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences at the University of Hamburg. He has held this position since 2022, following his role as a Research Associate at the same institution from 2017-2022. His academic career is complemented by industry experience as an IT Consultant at NTT DATA Deutschland GmbH.

Dr. Kurtz's educational background includes:

• M.A. in Management & Controlling / Information Systems from Leuphana University of Lüneburg (2013-2016)
• B.Sc. in Business Administration and Economics from Paderborn University (2010-2013)

His research is grounded in Information Systems (IS), with a focus on societal values and regulations in the design and governance of socio-technical ecosystems. He examines how regulations—such as the GDPR and the AI Act—and their underlying protective aims (e.g., privacy, transparency) can be operationalized within platform, service, and data ecosystems. This includes translating abstract legal norms into IS design—and, in turn, using insights from IS research to inform policy and regulatory development. To support this bidirectional relationship of IS and normative frameworks, he investigates how interdisciplinary collaboration—particularly between IS, law, and ethics—can be enabled, with a key focus on the use of boundary objects, such as architectural models, that help bridge disciplinary perspectives and support shared understanding.

Dr. Kurtz's recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on regulatory compliance in digital ecosystems, particularly examining how information systems can be designed to meet legal requirements while maintaining functionality. His work spans multiple domains including platform accountability, GDPR implementation challenges, and the development of interdisciplinary methods for ecosystem architecture that inform regulatory reasoning. There's a clear trend toward increasingly sophisticated approaches to bridging the gap between technical systems design and legal/ethical requirements.

Dr. Kurtz has received numerous academic and professional awards:

• Best Paper award at HICSS 54 (2021)
• Hamburg Teaching Prize for outstanding and innovative teaching (2021)
• Best Paper Nomination at HICSS 52 (2019)
• 3rd prize in Digital Science Slam on Computational Propaganda (2021)
• Class of the Year award at Leuphana University of Lüneburg (2016)
• Entrepreneurship Award at Leuphana University of Lüneburg (2015)
• Lower Saxony scholarship for talented students (2014)
• Innovation Award at NTT DATA Open Innovation Challenge (2017)
• Idea Competition Prize from Chamber of Skilled Crafts (2014)
• Finalist in Lüneburg Business Awards (2014)

As a dedicated mentor, Dr. Kurtz has supervised numerous Master's and Bachelor's theses focusing on cutting-edge topics in AI, data privacy, and digital transformation. His academic service includes representation roles in the Ethics Commission and examination boards. He has been actively involved in multiple research projects including "Informing Regulatory Reasoning on Algorithmic Systems in Societal Communication with STEAM" (2022-2025), "DL2030 - Digitale Dienstleistungen als Erfolgsfaktor für die Wertschöpfung der Zukunft" (2019-2023), and "Developing the socio-technical architecture method to inform policy choices in the shaping of COVID-19 digital infrastructure" (2021-2022).

Dr. Kurtz is actively engaged in the academic community through various leadership roles including Track Chair for ECIS 2026, Minitrack Chair for HICSS 58 and 59, and Associate Editor for multiple conference tracks. He serves as a reviewer for prestigious journals including Business Research, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and Journal of Information Technology.