Bernd Widdig is Associate Director of the International Science and Technology Initiative (MISTI) which has country programs in China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and Singapore. He is also Director of the MIT-Germany Program which he founded in 1997. The MIT-Germany Program is one of the largest program of its kind in the US and works with about 30 of the most successful German companies and research institutes.

Bernd Widdig studied Political Science, Sociology, and German Literature at the University of Bonn and received his Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University.

He has been teaching German Studies at MIT since 1989 and has published widely on twentieth-century German culture. His most recent book, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany , investigates the cultural dimensions and representations of the German hyperinflation in the early Twenties.