Born in 1946, Rolf-Dieter Postlep was raised in Wolfsburg (Lower Saxony). Following professional training as a bank clerk in Frankfurt (Main), he studied economics at the Philipps-University of Marburg from 1969 to 1973. Mr Postlep obtained his PhD in 1978. In the 1990s, he was directing the division for regional and transportation research at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. At the same time, he was a lecturer for public finance at Potsdam University and for economic policy at the University of Kassel, where he became a professor in 1996. From 2000 to 2015, he was President of Kassel University.

Throughout his career, Mr Postlep has served on numerous boards and committees. As a representative of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), he was chairman of the supervisory board of the Higher Education Information System (HIS) from 2003-2011 as well as chairman of the board of trustees at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt from 2009-2014.

In 2015, Rolf-Dieter Postlep became President of the Academy for Spatial Research and Planning in Hannover. On 6 December 2017, Mr Postlep was elected to be the new President of the Deutsches Studentenwerk (DSW).