Prof. Sebastian Lentz
Vice President of the Leibniz Association
Sebastian Lentz is a human geographer whose research focuses on regional geography, social and cultural geography, cartography, and transformation research. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Mannheim in 1988 and completed his habilitation there in 1999.
Regionally, his research is situated in Europe, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe. In conjunction with his research stays on the housing market in Moscow (habilitation), he held several visiting professorships at Lomonosov Moscow State University. From 2001 to 2003, he was Professor of Anthropogeography at the University of Erfurt, then from 2003 to 2024 Director of the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, and concurrently Professor of Regional Geography at the University of Leipzig. From 2016 to 2024, he was one of the spokespersons of the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Eastern Europe – Global Area: EEGA", conducted jointly with the Universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Jena. Since 2024, he has been a Senior Professor at the Institute of Geography of the University of Leipzig.
He was PI (jointly with J. Moser) in the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1199 "Processes of Spatialisation under Conditions of Globalisation", with projects on the production of spatial knowledge through maps and school atlases. A further focus of his research lay in discipline-specific conditions of knowledge and technology transfer and policy advice in the social and spatial sciences (jointly with D. Simon and A. Klee (WZB) and J. Moser (IfL)).
Since 2025, he has been an elected member of the General Assembly of the Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow (DI) in Leipzig, and since 2022 a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. At the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, he has led the interdisciplinary commission "Science and Values" since 2026.
As Vice President of the Leibniz Association, he has served since 2018 as the Executive Board's designated officer for the Leibniz evaluation procedure. In his current term of office, he is the designated officer for the competitive procedures of the Leibniz Association.
Further information
Contact
Prof. Sebastian Lentz
Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Leipzig
T +49 34 160055 107
S_Lentz(at)leibniz-ifl.de