Christian Bettstetter is professor and head of the Networked and Embedded Systems institute at the University of Klagenfurt. His main research and teaching interests are in mobile wireless networking, network theory, and self-organization. He is also scientific director and founder of Lakeside Labs GmbH, a research and technology platform on self-organizing networked systems.

He studied electrical engineering and information technology at the Technische Universität München (TUM), receiving the Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1998. After a research stay at the University of Notre Dame, Christian joined the institute of communication networks at TUM, where he was a research and teaching staff member until 2003. His doctoral thesis on mobility modeling, connectivity, and adaptive clustering in wireless ad hoc networks was awarded the Dr.-Ing (summa cum laude) degree in 2004. Before becoming a professor, Christian was a senior researcher at DoCoMo Euro-Labs for two years, doing research on medium access and topology aspects of ad hoc networks.

Christian and his team work on the design, modeling, and analysis of future networked communication systems, with a strong focus on mobile and wireless networking. Major expertise is on algorithms and protocols, stochastic modeling aspects, network theory, and architectures. Current projects address cooperative relaying, self-organized synchronization, communication in sparse networks, probabilistic flooding, and collaborative microdrones. Christian's teaching portfolio includes various graduate courses on mobile networks and an undergraduate course on electromagnetism.

The publication record includes 18 articles in journals, magazines, and books, and over 50 papers in refereed conference proceedings. One of his publications received the 2008 best paper award at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, and another one the 2004 outstanding paper award from the German Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (ITG). He also co-authored the Wiley textbook 'GSM - Architecture, protocols and services.' His current h-index, being a measure for the visibility and impact of publications, is 25.

He currently serves as editor for ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, committee member of several IEEE and ACM conferences, and project reviewer for the European Commission.