Senior Advisor of the Language Archive Unit at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen
After finishing the Diplom-Ingenieur Degree in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University Berlin in 1974 with computer science and digital signal processing as main topics, Wittenburg started working as research assistant setting up a center for control computation at TUB. In 1976 he became head of the technical group at the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.
In 2011, Wittenburg became the head of the new unit called The Language Archive that was built as a collaboration between Max-Planck-Society, Berlin-Brandenburg-Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
Since 1988 he is member of the IT Advisory board of Max Planck Society, had/has leading roles in European research and data infrastructure initiatives and was member of the High Level Expert Group which produced the “Riding the Wave” report on scientific data.