olderog comes from bredenbek in schleswig-holstein, northern germany, and studied computer science, mathematics and logic at the university of kiel, where he received his doctorate in 1981 supervised by prof. hans langmaack on hoare-style characterization systems for algol-like programming languages. after several research visits abroad (including the programming research group at the university of oxford and in amsterdam, edinburgh, yorktown heights and saarbrücken), he habilitated at kiel university in 1989 as well. since 1989, olderog has been based at the department of computer science, university of oldenburg. in 1994, olderog, together with his colleague manfred broy, was awarded the deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg) gottfried wilhelm leibniz prize, worth three million dm. from 1995 to 2005, olderog was chairman of the ifip working group 2.2 on formal description of programming concepts. in 1998, he received the silver core award from ifip for his work in this ifip group. olderog was editor of the journal "acta informatica" and has been a member of the academia europaea since 2012.