Burkhard is a full professor of «Distributed Systems and Networks» at the University of Zurich UZH since 2004. After receiving his Dr.rer.-nat. (PhD) degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1994, he worked at the University of Cambridge, U.K., ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and University of Federal Armed Forces Munich, Germany. At UZH he is leading the Communication Systems Group CSG with its main research interests in fully decentralized control (blockchains, clouds, peer-to-peer), network and service management (economic management), Internet-of-Things (security of constrained devices), and telecommunication economics (charting and accounting).

In addition to his full professorship position at IfI, Burkhard is a member of the UZH Blockchain Center's Steering Committee, the IFIP TC 6 chair on «Communication Systems», a member of the Luxembourg Science Foundation's (FNR) Scientific Council, and among others a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transaction on Network and Service Management (TNSM), Springer's Journal of Network and Service Management (JONS), and the KICS Journal of Communications and Network (JCN). Furthermore, he has actively been promoting Informatics in Zürich and Switzerland, being involved in events like the Swiss Digital Days or the Scientifica.  

After four years as the director of the IfI (2018–2022) Renato has decided to step down and to focus on his full professorship at IfI. The IfI would like to thank Renato sincerely for his commitment – specifically for his leadership during these challenging times of the Coronavirus and pandemic – and extends the best wishes to Renato for his continued success in his research field of visualizations and computer graphics.