Katharina Fleckenstein, born 1979, started working at the German Academic Exchange Service in June 2009.
Since June 2019 she is heading the regional DAAD office in Mexico City and the Information Point in San José Costa Rica, being in charge of Central América and the Caribbean.
From 2016 until 2019 she was head of section for DAAD scholarship programs in North Africa and the Middle East.
She was seconded to DAAD in Afghanistan (Kabul/Mazar-e Sharif) from 2014 to 2016 as senior advisor in a joint project “Academic Mining Education in Afghanistan” with the GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit).
Prior to this appointment she worked as senior desk officer for DAAD’s Pakistan programs in Bonn.
Her academic background is Religious and Islamic Studies at University of Erfurt and University of Exeter, UK. She earned her doctoral degree on the topic “Continuity and Change in Islamic Education for Women in Pakistan”, with field research stays in India and Pakistan. During her studies she was a scholarship holder of the Interdisciplinary Forum of Religion of the University of Erfurt as well as the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).