Professor Wil van der Aalst is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group.
His research interests include process mining, Petri nets, business process management, workflow management, process modeling, and process analysis. Wil van der Aalst has published over 250 journal papers, 22 books (as author or editor), 550 refereed conference/workshop publications, and 80 book chapters.
Many of his papers are highly cited (he one of the most cited computer scientists in the world; according to Google Scholar, he has an H-index of 161 and has been cited over 120,000 times) and his ideas have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees working on process support. Next to serving on the editorial boards of over ten scientific journals, he played an advisory role for several companies. He is called the Godfather of Process Mining and the research he started in the late 1990-ties led to a wave of process mining tools.
Van der Aalst received honorary degrees from the Moscow Higher School of Economics (Prof. h.c.), Tsinghua University, and Hasselt University (Dr. h.c.). He is also an IFIP Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen), Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen), and the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). In 2018 he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship, Germany’s most valuable research award (five million euros).
Van der Aalst is considered one of the most cited computer scientists in the world (top-15 worldwide according to Guide2Research). He has published over 250 journal papers, 22 books (as author or editor), 550 refereed conference/workshop publications, and 80 book chapters.