Born in 1946, Prof., Dr. and Dr. honoris causa Ekkehard Nuissl von Rein studied sociology and pedagogy. He was Manager of the Heidelberg Institute for Educational Research and Director of the Adult Education Centre (Volkshochschule) in Hamburg.

From 1991 until 2003 he lectured as a university professor on adult education at the Philipps-University in Marburg. Since 1991 he has been Director of the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE) in Bonn. In addition, he has held a chair in adult education at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2003 and has visiting professorships at the Universities of Torun (Poland), Timisoara (Romania) and Florence (Italy).

He has represented Germany at the OECD, UNESCO, the European Conference on Lifelong Learning and the European Commission in Brussels. In 1998, he was elected President of the European Research and Development Institutes of Adult Education (ERDI); since 2003 he has been serving as Past-President. From 1998 to 2004 he was Vice-President of the Leibniz Association.

For almost 40 years, he has been working in several contexts as counsellor and advisor in the field of education - mainly adult education - and as member of advisory boards in several federal organisations. In 2006 he was elected member of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. Since 2008 he has been a member of the Advisory Board for Educational Research at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

At the European level, he has worked as an expert in the context of the Socrates Programme (1996–2000), as German delegate in the Grundtvig working group (2000–2005), as evaluator of projects for the Leonardo, Socrates and Grundtvig programmes (since 2000) and as member of the “Implementation of the Action Plan on Adult Learning“ focus group at the European Commission in Brussels.

Several of his more than 600 publications are available in English and many other languages.