Wil van der Aalst

Wil van der Aalst is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University since 2018, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He serves as Chief Scientist at Celonis and is part-time affiliated with Fraunhofer FIT. Additional roles include deputy CEO of the Internet of Production Cluster of Excellence, co-director of the RWTH Center for Artificial Intelligence, and speaker of the RWTH ICT Profile Area. Previously, he led the Architecture of Information Systems group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) until 2017 and was a member of Tilburg University's Board of Governors (2015–2023).

Research interests focus on process mining, business process management, Petri nets, and model-based analysis. His work bridges formal methods with real-world applications, influencing software development, standardization committees, and commercial tools like Celonis, SAP, and YAWL.

• Developed foundational WorkFlow nets (WF-nets) and soundness criteria for workflow modeling
• Pioneered the Workflow Patterns initiative (with Arthur ter Hofstede and Nick Russell), impacting process modeling standards
• Founded the YAWL open-source workflow system and ProM process mining framework
• Chaired steering committees for major conferences (Business Process Management, IEEE Task Force on Process Mining)

Scientific honors include IEEE, ACM, and IFIP fellowships, the Alexander von Humboldt Award (2018), and memberships in prestigious academies such as Academia Europaea and the German Academy of Science and Engineering. He has an H-index of 182 (Google Scholar) and over 155,000 citations.

He has served on the editorial boards of journals including Business & Information Systems Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency. He also co-founded the BPM User Group Foundation and led the Data Science Center Eindhoven (DSC/e) until 2017.