WSBG congratulates Professor Markus Luczak-Roesch on double success
The Wellington School of Business and Government celebrates the promotion of Professor Markus Luczak-Roesch.
Previously an Associate Professor within the School of Information Management here at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, it is a double celebration as he has also been appointed as Co-Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini—the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence for complex systems, where he has served as a Principal Investigator since 2019.
It could be said that the budding professor’s principal investigation arrived when he was a 9-year-old trying to understand how the family’s computer worked. An old Commodore C64 had been gifted to the family, Professor Luczak-Roesch remembers “looking at this information processing machine, curious to learn how it worked in principle instead of just playing games on it”. A chance to do a computer programming course in Basic was offered by a German bank. While in attendance, learning his first programming language, he developed the idea that one day he wanted to become a professor who researches how information flows, and to teach other people all about that so that we'd understand the world a bit better.
Professor Luczak-Roesch is an interdisciplinary scientist with a background in Computer Science, interested in the big questions about the world, including the structures and dynamics of the Internet, the evolution of humanity, and the natural time scales of the Earth system. He has studied and taught at three different universities in three different countries, completing both undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications up to PhD level at the Free University of Berlin in the Institute of Informatics, and teaching there from 2010 until 2013. Until 2016 he worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, whereupon he joined Victoria University as a Senior Lecturer, promoted to Associate Professor in 2019 and becoming Professor in late 2023.
Of this promotion, Professor Luczak-Roesch says he is conscious that it may give him slightly more visibility, and he is looking forward to being able to contribute to an academic environment where everyone can thrive, independent from their background.
As the first ever in his family to attend school long enough to obtain a university entry qualification, this is an important point, and he adds that the journey “always felt like incredibly hard work”, including a feeling of imposter syndrome given the different social background to many of his peers. He has had to learn everything by himself, negotiating the university path without the chance to learn from any experiences within his family. He also attributes his “natural curiosity” to exactly this. “I developed a deep desire to find the people who could teach me. In a way I had to learn to listen very carefully and think critically about what I heard from people. I became a very good listener and observer.”