About

I am Han van der Aa, a professor of Process-Oriented Information Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Vienna, where I lead the Workflow Systems and Technology group.

My research centers on process mining: the analysis of organizational processes based on the data generated as they run. Such analysis can show how a process typically unfolds, where reality diverges from what was expected, where bottlenecks form, and what is likely to happen next — across settings as different as manufacturing, public administration, and healthcare. Together with my team and collaborators, I develop techniques that push process mining beyond abstract, descriptive analysis: methods that account for the meaning of individual process steps rather than treating them as abstract symbols, that turn predicted problems into concrete recommendations for how to act, and that keep such analysis responsible — safeguarding fairness and the privacy of sensitive data.

Before joining the University of Vienna in 2024, I was a Junior Professor at the School of Business Informatics and Mathematics of the University of Mannheim and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Databases and Information Systems Group at Humboldt University of Berlin. I received my PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2018, supervised by Hajo Reijers and Henrik Leopold, following an MSc in Business Information Systems and a BSc in Industrial Engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology.

I have contributed to over 100 peer-reviewed publications. Most of my work targets venues in the business process management and process mining community, where I regularly publish in the main BPM, CAiSE, and ICPM conferences — receiving research awards at each — and in the Information Systems and Process Science journals. Next to that, my work reaches into adjacent communities, including top data-management and software-engineering venues such as SIGMOD, ICDE, IEEE TKDE, and IEEE TSE, alongside information systems venues like ECIS, HICSS, and Decision Support Systems.