Brandt School Boards

Andrea von Rauch has a diploma in engineering and landscape planning from Leibniz University Hannover and Humboldt University Berlin. She has been coordinating development programs at the local and regional level and has been a desk officer at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) for Africa. From 2015 und 2021 she was the director of the Academy for International Cooperation at the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ). From 2021 to 2024, she served as the director of GIZ's Representation in Brussels. She is currently the Director General of GIZ International Services.

Rupert Antes studied Biology at the University of Bonn and the University of Western Australia and holds a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Bonn. He worked for nearly ten years at the German Academic Scholarship Foundation as an assistant to the general secretary and as the director for exceptional stipend programs. Since 2001, he is managing director of the Haniel Foundation. The foundation supports future leadership potential in international enterprises and institutions with a focus on the nexus of economy, politics, public administration and science.

Jale Tosun is a professor of Political Science at the Institute of Political Science. After studying political and administrative science in Konstanz and Pavia, she completed her PhD at the University of Konstanz on the topic of transformative change of environmental policy in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Jale Tosun was a Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research before coming to Heidelberg in October 2013 as an assistant professor of International and Comparative Political Economy. She has been a professor of Political Science since March 2015. Her teaching and research focuses mainly on the comparative study of regulation in areas of environment, energy, and climate change, as well as on distributive conflicts within the European Union and the influence of the EU on regulatory measures in third-party states.  She is part of the “Deep Decarbonisation: The Democratic Challenge of Navigating Governance Traps” (DeepDCarb) project, that deals with the fundamental question on how to reduce carbon emissions in the economy. 

Wolfgang Tiefensee was Thuringia's Minister for Economic Affairs, Science, and Digital Society from 2014-2024. He is trained as a telecommunications technician and performed his national service as a construction soldier from 1975. In 1979, he earned an engineering degree in Industrial Electronics and worked as a development engineer in Leipzig until 1990, during which he also completed a part-time degree in Construction Informatics in 1982.
His political career began in 1991 as a city councilor in Leipzig after participating in the city's Round Table discussions. In 1994, he became Deputy Mayor and joined the SPD shortly thereafter. From 1998 to 2005, he served as Leipzig's Lord Mayor, achieving notable successes for the city.
From 2005 to 2009, he was Germany's Federal Minister for Transport, Building, and Urban Development. Since 2009, he has chaired the "Forum Ostdeutschland der Sozialdemokratie e.V." He was a member of the German Bundestag from 2009 until late 2014, when he stepped down to take on his current role in Thuringia.