Publication prize

The book compiles the results of the transregional Collaborative Research Center TRR141 'Biological Design and Integrative Structures', funded by the German Research Foundation between 2014 and 2019 and carried out by architects, engineers and natural scientists from the universities of Stuttgart, Freiburg and Tübingen.

For as long as humankind has been building, it has taken its inspiration from nature. Until now, however, it has remained a matter of transferring forms and ornaments. The step towards digital methods in all areas of science allows a different approach to the transfer of functions from biology and thus a new definition of the relation between nature, architecture and technology. The aim of the projects presented in this book is to explore the possibilities of this biomimetic transfer by addressing very different scientific questions.

This book is a slightly revised and somewhat expanded version of a catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Baubionik - Biologie beflügelt Architektur" at the Naturkundemuseum Stuttgart.

"The book ´Biomimetics for Architecture: Learning from Nature’ offers deep insight into the interdisciplinary research of the transregional collaborative research project ´Design and Construction Principles in Biology and Architecture´. This is an impressive example of how new approaches for constructing the buildings of tomorrow can arise at the interface between architecture, engineering and science."
Vice Dean Prof. Achim Menges, Faculty 1

• Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE)
• Transregional collaborative research project TRR141 "Biological Design and Integrative Structures"

Contact:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jan Knippers, Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design, Faculty 1, Telephone: +49 711 685 83280, email

Knippers, J., Schmid, U., & Speck, T. (Eds.). Bionisch bauen: von der Natur lernen. Birkhäuser 2019.

Skeletal muscles are an integral part of the musculoskeletal system. The modelling and computer-based simulation of movements of the musculoskeletal system thus requires an accurate description of the mechanical properties of muscles. Tissue alterations, for example as a result of disease, can strongly influence these properties, but usually show up on much smaller length scales, such as in the underlying protein structures in the micrometre range. The multiscale continuum-mechanical model for skeletal muscle tissue presented in the publication allows the direct use of microstructural data and thus represents an important paradigm shift in skeletal muscle modelling. Experimental results from histological examinations or image-based methods can thus be used directly as input parameters for simulations. The presented model is thus an important step on the way to envisioned clinical applications.

"The publication by Mr. Bleiler, an Early Career Researcher [LR1] at our faculty, presents not only a paradigm shift in the multi-scale modelling of muscle tissue, it is also a great example of how a winner of the Humboldt Research Award has used his stay at the University of Stuttgart as an opportunity to develop a new and productive international research collaboration."
Dean Prof. Harald Garrecht, Faculty 2

• Institute for Modeling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems (IMSB)
• Partner at the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Pedro Ponte Castañeda

Contact: 
Christian Bleiler, Institute for Modeling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems, Faculty 2, telephone: +49 711 685 65853, email 

Bleiler, C., Ponte Castañeda, P. und Röhrle, O. (2019). A micro-structurally-based, multi-scale, continuum-mechanical model for the passive behaviour of skeletal muscle tissue. Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 97, 171-186.

We demonstrate that THz spectroscopy offers a route for efficient measurement of the electrical conductivity of novel 2D materials such as graphene. Because of their unique properties, these materials have a great potential in various applications, such as faster and more energy-efficient beyond Moore electronics. Here we compare quantum effects of the conductivity simultaneously detected by THz spectroscopy and conventional contact measurements in high magnetic fields on graphene. We demonstrate that THz spectroscopy gives a reliable assessment of electrical conductivity, while contact methods tend to overestimate transport properties. Additionally THz spectroscopy allows measurements without contacting the sample. This is very advantageous because the preparation of contacts deteriorates the graphene properties. This allows an efficient and non-invasive quality control for the optimization of the large-scale production of 2D materials for future applications.

"The research commission for the Faculty of Chemistry decided to nominate excellent work that was primarily conducted independently by Early Career Researchers. For the first time, Dr. Dominik Bloos succeeded in determining the transport characteristics of Graphene using the terahertz magneto-optic method, both contactless and directional."
Vice Dean Prof. Elias Klemm, Faculty 3

• Institute of Physical Chemistry, van Slageren research group 
• Faculty 3 - chemistry

Contact:
Dr. Dominik Bloos, Institute of Physical Chemistry, Faculty 3, telephone: +49 711 685 64478, email

Bloos, D., Kunc, J., Kaeswurm, L., Myers-Ward, R. L., Daniels, K., DeJarld, M., Nath, A., van Slageren, J., Gaskill, D. K., Neugebauer, P. (2019): Contactless millimeter wave method for quality assessment of large area graphene. In: 2D Materials, (IF 7.14), Volume 6, Number 3.

Chronic neuropathic pain is nerve pain that results from damage to or disease of nerve structures. It dramatically affects a patients' quality of life and shows little to no response to common pain medications. Women are more likely to suffer from neuropathic pain than men, and preclinical and clinical studies show that female and male patients often do not respond equally to medications. In the presented work, we developed a novel drug candidate that showed long-lasting pain relief in both sexes in a preclinical study. Mechanistically, we were able to show that pain relief is mediated by specific regulatory immune cells. These cells not only alleviate the inflammatory process that triggers nerve damage, but also simultaneously contribute to the regeneration of nerve tissue. In summary, in this study we present a novel putative drug that reprograms the immune system to provide long-lasting pain relief. This drug has great potential for clinical application in pain patients.

"This outstanding publication shows how the immune system and the nervous system interact, and how this interaction brings new opportunities for developing new approaches for the effective treatment of neuropathic pain. The medication introduced in this paper will hopefully be used in the near future to meet currently unmet needs in the field of chronic pain therapy."
Dean Prof. Günter Scheffknecht, Faculty 4

• Institute of Cell Biology and Immunology
• Department of Biology, Drexel University
• Faculty 4 - Energy-, Process- and Bio-Engineering

Contact:
Roman Fischer, Institute of Cell Biology and Immunology, Faculty 4, telephone: +49 711 685-67453, email

Fischer, R., Sendetski, M., del Rivero, T., Martinez, G. F., Bracchi-Ricard, V., Swanson, K.A., Pruzinsky, E. K., Delguercio, N., Rosalino, M. J., Padutsch, T., Kontermann, R.E., Pfizenmaier, K., Bethea, J. R. (2019): TNFR2 promotes Treg-mediated recovery from neuropathic pain across sexes. In: PNAS August 20, 2019 116 (34) 17045-17050.

Ähnlich wie elektronische Schaltungen können auch Licht verarbeitende Strukturen, so genannte photonische Bauelemente, auf kleinstem Raum in Silizium-Chips integriert werden. Bei allen Anwendungen, sei es in der Nachrichtentechnik, der Sensorik oder bei Quantenexperimenten, ist die entscheidende Stelle der möglichst verlustfreie Übergang zwischen der Außenwelt und dem Chip. Dieser wird meist in Form eines einfachen planaren Beugungsgitters realisiert, allerdings gehen dabei etwa 50% des Lichtes verloren. In unserem Artikel präsentieren wir als Highlight einen Gitterkoppler mit einer messtechnisch nachgewiesenen Koppeleffizienz von 89%, dem derzeitigen Weltrekord bei einer Wellenlänge von 1,55 µm. Möglich wurde dies durch ein spezielles Design und eine angepasste Fertigungstechnik. Zusätzlich werden optisch breitbandige und kompakte Varianten vorgestellt. Vor allem die gezeigten Messwerte verleihen den Forschungsergebnissen Gewicht, da andere Gruppen zwar noch höhere Effizienzen simuliert haben, der experimentelle Nachweis aber bisher nicht geführt wurde.

"The field of 'Integrated Phonic Systems’ is central to the strategic development plans of the Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Information Technology over the next few years. The nominated publication 'Ultra-Efficient Silicon-on-Insulator Grating Couplers with Backside Metal Mirrors' provides new scientific knowledge in this field. It delivers the world’s highest proven coupling efficiency and spectrum, thus giving it an extremely important practical importance in the field of optic data transfer and for photonic quantum technologies."
Vice Dean Prof. Krzysztof Rudion, Faculty 5

• Institute of Electrical and Optical Communications Engineering
• Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces [de] 
• Institute of Microelectronics
• Faculty 5 – Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Contact:
Niklas Hoppe, Institute of Electrical and Optical Communications, Faculty 5, telephone: +49 711 685-67918, email

Hoppe N., Zaoui, W., Rathgeber, L., Wang, Y., Klenk, R., Vogel, W., Kaschel, M., Portalupi, S., Burghartz, J., Berroth, M. (2019): Ultra-Efficient Silicon-on-Insulator Grating Couplers With Backside Metal Mirrors.

The majority of all flows in technology and nature are turbulent, i.e. they are characterized by a vast range of spatial and temporal scales that we perceive as vortices or eddies. These turbulent fluctuations influence each other across the full spectrum – this in turn makes a complete resolution of all occurring interactions in a numerical simulation prohibitively costly. Here, turbulence modeling comes into play, as it reduces the computational costs by orders of magnitude and thus enables the simulation of flows for practical applications. These turbulence models are approximate in nature, and their characteristics determine the quality of the simulation results. Commonly, the development of these models is guided by physical or mathematical considerations. In our work, we complement these strategies by methods from machine learning conditioned on turbulent flow data. This allows us to derive turbulence models that can be tailored to the underlying numerical schemes and achieve a better accuracy than currently established methods.

"This work forges a link between the current methods of machine learning and established methods of simulation technology, thus making a new and very valuable contribution to the field of turbulence modeling."
Vice Dean Prof. Walter Fichter, Faculty 6

• Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, Numerical Methods Research Group

Contact: 
Andrea Beck, Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, Faculty 6, telephone: +49 711 685 60218, email 

Beck, A., Flad, D., Munz, C. (2019): Deep neural networks for data-driven LES closure models. In: Journal of Computational Physics 398, Elsevier.

With the growing complexity of engineering systems, obtaining an accurate mathematical model to design suitable controllers becomes a more and more difficult and time-consuming task. On the other hand, the availability of data from systems and processes is steadily increasing. Therefore, there has been a rising interest in learning controllers directly from data without the necessity of finding a suitable mathematical model first. One of the drawbacks of many existing data-driven control approaches, however, is their lack of guarantees for stability. Such stability guarantees can, for example, be obtained via system theoretic properties. Knowledge of certain system properties can be leveraged to design controllers with stability guarantees for the closed-loop behavior. In the present publication, we introduce an approach to determine such system theoretic properties from only one input-output trajectory of an otherwise unknown linear system. For this, we develop a data-based condition for such system properties that is easy to verify without knowledge of a mathematical model.

"As is also the case in many other disciplines, data-based approaches also play an important role in the field of automatic control engineering. The publication nominated by Faculty 7 for the publication prize is ´One-Shot Verification of Dissipativity Properties from Input–Output Data´, where the authors introduce a new data-based formulation of system characteristics, where conclusions about the dissipativity properties of a system can be drawn based purely on data. This lays the corner stone for the development of more stable, data-driven control methods."
Dean Prof. Hans-Christian Möhring, Faculty 7

• Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control
• Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control, Frank Allgöwer Research Group

Contact:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Allgöwer, Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control, Faculty 7, telephone: +49 711 685 67733, email

Romer, A., Berberich, J., Köhler, J., & Allgöwer, F. (2019). One-shot verification of dissipativity properties from input–output data. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 3(3), 709-714.

Groups are algebraic structures that are used to analyze symmetries in mathematics itself, and in the natural sciences. The finite simple groups are in a sense the "atoms" of this theory; see the "periodic system" in the displayed figure. This has been achieved as the monumental result of a combined effort of hundreds of mathematicians over several decades!

Just as one can capture a complicated 3-dimensional structure by 2-dimensional projections and pictures, so is a finite group described in a compact way by its character table, a certain matrix of complex numbers. There are remarkable, partly only conjectural relations among those numbers that reflect properties of the group in a subtle way. The publication establishes such a relation, conjectured since 25 years, and provides the theoretical foundation for new algorithms for computing character tables of simple groups of Lie type.

"Professor Dr. Meinolf Geck has solved one of the fundamental problems in the character theory of finite groups, which has remained unsolved for the last 25 years and until now has only been used in special cases. In this paper, which was published in a top journal, he combines in-depth methods of various mathematical disciplines. Congratulations!"
Vice Dean Prof. Timo Weidl, Faculty 8

• Institute of Algebra and Number Theory, Department of Algebra

Contact:
Prof. Meinolf Geck, Department of Algebra, Faculty 8, telephone +49 711 685 65367, email 

Geck, M. (2020): Green functions and Glauberman degree-divisibility. In: Annals of Math. 192, 229-249.

Toni Bernhart’s book „Volksschauspiele: Genese einer kulturgeschichtlichen Formation“ [„Folk Plays: Their History and Emergence“] is about the various ideas, shapes and perceptions of folk plays in the past centuries. Very different plays have been named a folk play: passion plays, biblical plays and vernacular plays of the eighteenth century, peasants’ theatre, muppet shows and knight spectacle of the nineteenth century, mass theatre, nazi-drama, agitprop and workers’ theatre of the twentieth century. The book reconstructs the history and emergence of folk plays from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and argues if and to what extent a folk play can count as a dramatic genre or rather as a chimaera. Commented text examples which range from Johann Gottfried Herder over Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Ödön von Horváth to Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek accompany the study.

"The book ´Volksschauspiele´ by Toni Bernhart is not only technically excellent, but also easy to understand and very readable. This is not often the case with academic books."
Dean Prof. Kerstin Thomas, Faculty 9

• Institute of Literary Studies
• Partner webpage “DramaNet – Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net” at the Free University of Berlin

Contact:
Dr. Toni Bernhart, Institute of Literary Studies, Faculty 9, telephone: +49 711 685 83061, email

Bernhart, T: Volksschauspiele. Genese einer kulturgeschichtlichen Formation. Reihe: Deutsche Literatur. Studien und Quellen, 31, 2019.

OECD‘s PISA Study is the most noted and influential international comparative educational study of our time. 
Ignited by the well-known PISA shock in 2001, following the publication of the first PISA results, Germany’s educational sector has evolved in many regards: Our schools have made progress, but they are also facing new challenges. Our paper on analysing trend over time using PISA data suggests to overcome the still mostly isolated evaluation and interpretation of the many international studies on educational monitoring. Instead, we propose to apply an integrated consideration of several studies and their link to demographic data. This claim cannot be solved at an empirical level only, but it requires an adequate theoretical framework. Following the scheme “from cases to patterns”, our paper extrapolates findings from implementing international large-scale assessments and projects how methodological boundaries can be shifted.  

"This publication makes an important contribution to the advancement of empirical educational research. It clarifies how isolated interpreted findings from various educational monitoring studies can be translated into integrative conclusions. This is an example of extensive groundwork on the further development of study designs and the interpretation of findings for international large-scale assessments."
Dean Prof. Michael-Jörg Oesterle, Faculty 10

• Institute of Education
• Professional School of Education Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg [de]
• • Faculty 10 – Management, Economics and Social Sciences

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Christine Sälzer, Institute of Education, Faculty 10, telephone: +49 711 685-87440, email 

Sälzer, C., Prenzel, M. (2019): Examining Change over Time in International Large-Scale Assessments: Lessons Learned from PISA. In: Suter, L. E., Smith, E., & Denman, B. D. (Eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Studies in Education (243-257). London: SAGE Publishing.