Prof. Dr.rer.nat. Ernst Rank, born in 1954, studied mathematics and physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1974 to 1980. Having obtained his doctoral degree from the Faculty for Civil Engineering and Geodesy of the Technische Universität München in 1985, he became a DAAD fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA until 1986. From 1987 to 1990 he held the position of senior scientist at the Corporate Research and Technology Department of SIEMENS AG in Munich. He was appointed professor for Numerical Methods and Information Science in Civil Engineering at the University of Dortmund in 1990 and held the chair for Computation in Engineering at the Technische Universität München from 1997 until his retirement in 2020. His main areas of research are in Computational Engineering and the modelling of product and processes in civil engineering. He has published more than 400 papers in scientific journals, as book contributions and in reviewed conference proceedings.

Prof. Rank held the office of Vice President Research of TUM from 2002 to 2008. From 2005 to 2006 he was responsible for coordinating TUM's proposals for the Excellence Initiative by the German federal and state governments to promote science and research at German universities. From 2006 to 2016 he was Director of the International Graduate School of Science and Engineering at the Technische Universität München, and from 2008 to 2013 Founding Director of the TUM Graduate School. From April 2015 until 2020 Prof. Rank was Director of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS).

Prof. Rank is the Chairman of the University Council of TU Dortmund since 2007. He obtained the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Medal of TUM (2006), the Konrad-Zuse Medaille (2009), the Federal Cross of Merit (2009), and is Corresponding Member of the Nordrhein Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste (2014). In 2017 he became member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and 2018 Fellow of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM).  Since 2021 he is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Georg Nemetschek Institute Aritificial Intelligence for the Built World.