The Dean of the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Prof Dr Christoph Grafe, thanked Ulrike Reutter for her dedicated teaching and research. He also praised her valuable and forward-looking contributions to the further development of the Transport Engineering degree programme.

Important collaboration

In her farewell lecture "Your route will be recalculated - impulses for the mobility and transport transition", Ulrike Reutter emphasised that the mobility and transport transition must be implemented urgently in order to make cities more liveable and to achieve the climate targets in transport. "Public transport and mobility management play key roles in this. I was able to organise the teaching and research on this in productive collaboration with politicians and the administration of the city of Wuppertal, with WSW mobil, the business community and with local mobility initiatives," says the scientist.

Now the researcher herself is turning towards retirement. Where is her personal route taking her and what expectations does she have for the future? "My husband and I want to explore lots of cities and regions, combining bus, train and bike travel. I'm looking forward to that."

Ulrike Reutter studied spatial planning at the University of Dortmund and completed her doctorate with a dissertation entitled "Car-free living in the city". She has worked as a researcher in Berlin, Dortmund and Kaiserslautern. In the summer semester of 2015, she accepted a position at the University of Wuppertal and has since been head of the teaching and research area "Public Transport Systems and Mobility Management". During this time, she was also a board member of the Centre for Transformation Research and Sustainability (TransZent) at the University of Wuppertal and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.