Umut Durak is Deputy Head of the Safety-Critical Systems and Systems Engineering Department at the DLR Institute of Flight Systems and Professor at Clausthal University of Technology, where he leads the Joint Research Group on Aeronautical Informatics. His current research spans the technology stack for software-defined aircraft, from open instruction set hardware to portable execution formats such as WebAssembly, and from cloud-native onboard architectures to safe airborne AI and agile certification. He teaches graduate courses on aeronautical informatics and simulation engineering, and supervises master and doctoral students. He has published five books and more than 100 papers. He is Senior Editor for the Aerospace Information Systems area of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. At the AIAA he is an Associate Fellow and past Chair of the Software Technical Committee.