Heike Ripphausen-Lipa

Prof. Dr. Heike Ripphausen-Lipa is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Media at Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT Berlin). Her career spans academic and industry roles, including a software developer position at Lufthansa Systems GmbH (1994–2001) and teaching/leadership roles at Technical University Berlin (2001–2017), where she served as Dean of her department (2011–2016). She received the Teaching Award 2011–2016 for her contributions to education.

• Education: Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University (1989), Doctorate in Mathematics at TU Berlin (1994) on efficient algorithms for planar graphs.

Research interests focus on graph algorithms (especially planar graphs), optimization in resource allocation (e.g., minimizing material consumption or delivery time), and combinatorial methods in VLSI design. She also emphasizes algorithm visualization to aid student understanding and heuristics development for practical optimization problems.

Scientific awards include the

• Teaching Award 2011–2016

She supervises final theses related to algorithm visualization (e.g., Java/C++ libraries for visualizing graph algorithms) and optimization heuristics for real-world resource management. Her publications span theoretical algorithm design (1993–1997), industry-academia collaboration (2017), and internationally networked teaching models (2017).