Christian Bettstetter is professor and head of the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems at the University of Klagenfurt. He also serves as the founding scientific director of Lakeside Labs GmbH, a research and innovation company.

After studying electrical engineering and information technology at Technische Universität München, he joined the communication networks group led by Jörg Eberspächer, where he completed his doctorate in engineering (Dr.-Ing., summa cum laude) with a dissertation on wireless ad hoc networks. He gained experience in the USA as an intern and guest student. Following his graduation, Bettstetter worked as a senior researcher at DOCOMO Euro-Labs before being appointed professor in 2005.

At the University of Klagenfurt, Bettstetter and his team work on wireless connectivity and self-organization in networked systems, with applications spanning telecommunications, IoT, and mobile robotics. Current projects investigate interference, synchronization, industrial sensor networks, and communications and path planning of drones. He coordinates an interdisciplinary research cluster on self-organizing systems and acted as faculty member in the Karl Popper school on networked autonomous aerial vehicles.

His teaching portfolio includes undergraduate lectures on electricity and magnetism, graduate lectures on mobile communications and networking, and multidisciplinary seminars on networks. His dedication to teaching was recognized with the 2022 Prize for Excellence in Teaching, honoring the didactic concept and high quality of lectures. Bettstetter also coauthored the book “GSM: Architecture, protocols and services.”

His scientific contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the outstanding publication award from the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (“Preis der ITG“, 2004) as well as best paper awards from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) (2008 and 2009), the ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM, 2017), the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO, 2019), and the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS, 2021). The federal state of Carinthia awarded Bettstetter the “Würdigungspreis” in Science and Engineering (2018), an honor presented every four years to celebrate outstanding scientific careers. Bettstetter is also a regular keynote speaker at scientific conferences.

Bettstetter has reviewed over a hundred projects and project proposals at the European Commission, European Research Council, and several national science funds across Europe. His roles in university management and administration include memberships in the senate and search committees. He served as a committee member in more than a hundred conferences and workshops, founder and co-organizer of Lakeside Research Days (biannually since 2008), area editor for ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (2005–2014), program chair of the International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (2011), steering board member of the ESF-funded program MiNEMA (2006–2009), and organizing committee member of ACM MobiCom (2005). He is an active science communicator, sharing insights on research and teaching through videos and social media.