The Vietsch Foundation’s Medal of Honour
The Vietsch Foundation was created through the last will and testament of the late Willem Karel Vietsch (1952-2014), Secretary General of TERENA for over 15 years.
GÉANT collaborates with the Vietsch Foundation with regards to both the Innovation Programme (where strong proposals that are outside the scope of the Innovation Programme can be shared with the Foundation for consideration) and the Community Award (to avoid overlap with the Medal of Honour).
About the Vietsch Foundation
The mission of the Vietsch Foundation is to promote research and development of advanced Internet technology for scientific research and higher education.
The Vietsch Foundation fulfils its goals in two ways:
- It funds specific research and development projects that demonstrate potential value to progress European and global research and education networking.
- Each year it awards a medal of honour to people who contributed to the development of a service, technology or approach that will be of lasting value to the research and education networking community and its users.
Medal of Honour
The Vietsch Foundation awards a Medal of Honour on an annual basis to honour people whose initiatives led to a lasting organisational set-up or a service that is of great value to the research and education community.
Eligible are demonstrable, sustainable achievements in the set-up of a new organisation or service that help accelerating innovation in support of science research and higher education. The Medal can be awarded to the innovators as well as to those who have built on that innovation and made it sustainable. In case of proven collaboration, the Medal can be assigned also to different individuals involved in the process.
To nominate someone please send an e-mail explaining the reasons for your submission to nominations@vietsch-foundation.org.
The winner is announced at TNC, GÉANT's flagship conference. .2024 Winner
Christian Grimm, Chief Executive Officer, DFN
The recipient of the 2024 medal of honour of the Vietsch Foundation was Christian Grimm, Chief Executive Officer of DFN, the research and education networking (NREN) organisation of Germany. “This year we received a large number of very valuable nominations and we had a tough time in making our choice. We selected Christian Grimm because of the undisputed impact of his achievement on research and education networking at the European as well as international/global level”, Valentino Cavalli, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation.About Christian
Christian Grimm is Chief Executive Officer of the German National Research and Education Network (Verein zur Förderung eines Deutschen Forschungsnetzes e. V. – DFN-Verein). Christian joined DFN in 2009 and was appointed to his current position in 2011. In 2013 Christian was elected to the Board of Directors of DANTE Ltd. in Cambridge, UK. From this position he helped drive the merger of DANTE with the TERENA Association in Amsterdam, NL. This process led to the formation of the Dutch GÉANT Association in 2014. Christian was elected to its founding Board of Directors and served as Chairman of the Board from 2015 to 2020.
Christian is active in various boards and committees both in German academia and in research and education networking organisations worldwide. Prior to DFN, Christian was Head of Research and Development and member of the directorate at the Regional Computing Centre for Lower Saxony (RRZN), one of the largest Tier 2 HPC centres in Germany at that time. In parallel, he was appointed Assistant Professor for computer networks at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität in Hanover. He holds a Diploma in Electrical Engineering and a Doctoral Degree in Information Technology.