Professor Bastian Harrach studied mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of Mainz on a scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. He received his doctorate in 2006. He also had a postdoc position at the Johann Radon Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and regular research stays at the Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.
He turned down primo-loco placements for an assistant professorship (W1) in Leipzig and a tenured associate professorship (W2) in Passau in favor of becoming associate professor at the TU Munich and tenured associate professor at the University of Würzburg. In 2013, he was appointed full professor and chair (W3) of Optimization and Inverse Problems at the University of Stuttgart. He followed the call for a W3-professorship for Numerics of Partial Differential Equations at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2015. He rejected a further W3-offer to TU Berlin in 2023 in favor of the competing offer to stay at Goethe University. Since January 1, 2024, he is the Dean of the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at Goethe University.
Professor Bastian Harrach is a contact professor for the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (since 2017), editorial board member of the scientific journals Communications on Analysis and Computation (since 2023), Inverse Problems (since 2019), Math. Methods Appl. Sci. (since 2013) and Inverse Probl. Sci. Eng. (2014-2021), and founding member, executive board member, and treasurer of the Inverse Problems International Associations e.V.