(* 19. April 1943  † 25. September 2019)

Siegfried Pöppl was born on 19 April 1943 in Regensburg. After studying telecommunications at the Technical University of Munich, he worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. In 1971 he was appointed head of the working group for signal processing at the Institute for Medical Data Processing of the Society for Radiation and Environmental Research (GSF) in Munich. In 1974 he received his doctorate in engineering from the Technical University of Munich. In 1976 he was elected Chairman of the Signal Processing Working Group of the German Society for Medical Documentation, Computer Science and Statistics (GMDS). In 1977 he was one of the founding members of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM). In 1981 he habilitated at the Technical University of Munich in the field of Medical Informatics and Statistics. His election as President of the DAGM and his appointment as a member of the Computer Commission of the German Research Foundation (DFG) subsequently paid special tribute to his scientific achievements, which were based on his intensive fundamental work in the field of image and signal processing and pattern recognition in medical fields of application.
 
In 1990 Siegfried Pöppl accepted the call to the C4-Professorship for Medical Informatics at the University of Lübeck. As founding director, he established the Institute for Medical Informatics and at the same time significantly expanded his work and research area, which now included not only pattern recognition but also hospital information systems. In addition, as initiator and founding father, he contributed significantly and with great skill to establishing new institutes in the field of computer science, mathematics and technology at the University of Lübeck and thus laid the foundation stone for our section computer science/technology. As senate representative he was responsible from 1991 on for the new establishment of ten professorships as well as for the establishment of the diploma course of studies computer science with medical informatics as application subject, which started in the winter term 1993/94. These were important milestones in his scientific career, but also for our university, which has developed from a purely medically oriented university to today's life science university with a strong computer science/technology section. As Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology, he was significantly involved in the further expansion of the faculty and the university. In addition to the local computer science course, he initiated the establishment of the distance learning course Medical Computer Science as a minor subject in the diploma course in computer science at the Fernuniversität Hagen in 2000, which has since been offered within the framework of a cooperation between the University of Lübeck and the Fernuniversität Hagen.
 
Prof. Pöppl has done an outstanding scientific job for the Institute of Medical Informatics, the Section of Computer Science/Technology and the University of Lübeck. We will honour his memory.