"I am delighted that we can once again award the publication prize to honor outstanding achievements from all ten faculties on Research Day this year," said Prof. Manfred Bischoff, Vice Rector for Research and Early Career Researchers at the University of Stuttgart, in his speech. The prizes, each endowed with 2,500 euros, highlight the diversity of the University of Stuttgart and serve as an important tool for showcasing research and recognizing researchers, particularly young scientists.
Ten exciting research projects: The publication prizes for 2024
Faculty 1, Dr. Franz Arlart: On the magic of gas stations
Dr. Franz Arlart’s research dealt with the "The changing symbolism of the gas station as a building type". The award winner, who now works as a freelance architect, completed his doctorate at the Institute for Industrial Building, Design and Construction. His work is dedicated to a century-old "magical place" of encounters, offering much more than just gasoline and symbolically representing freedom. While designing a gas station was a pioneering task in 1920, this building type evolved into a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, and then into a more functional building twenty years later. Today, gas stations are electrified, so to speak, and at yet another exciting turning point, says Alart.
Franz Arlart: Die Tankstelle. Ein Bautypus im Wandel seiner Symbolhaftigkeit, Berlin 2023: jovis Verlag
Faculty 2, Dr. Kilian Mouris: Getting to the bottom of reservoirs
Climate change poses many major challenges and attention is turning to reservoirs as a key aspect of addressing water shortages in extreme situations. However, these are often no longer able to fulfill their full function. The reason, according to Dr. Kilian Mouris, is the accumulation of sediment. At the Institute for Hydraulic and Environmental Systems Engineering Mouris, who now works at the Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute, has taken up this topic. His work presents an interdisciplinary model chain that makes it possible to recognize deposit patterns, predict the suspended sediment load and thus operate good sediment management in reservoirs.
Kilian Mouris, Sebastian Schwindt, María Herminia Pesci, Silke Wieprecht, and Stefan Haun: An interdisciplinary model chain quantifies the footprint of global change on reservoir sedimentation, Scientific Reports (2023) 13:20160.
Faculty 3, Dr. Lorenzo Tesi: Quantum leaps thanks to interdisciplinary collaboration
Dr. Lorenzo Tesi from the Institute of Physical Chemistry consistently works in an interdisciplinary manner to conduct research on the threshold of the second quantum revolution. The Emmy Noether Prize winner published his work on quantum technology together with physical chemists, polymer chemists and a surface expert. The team developed a bottom-up method by which molecular qubits can be arranged on surfaces as functional groups of self-organized monolayers. Molecular qubits are seen as a field of research with great potential: In the future, they could form the basic building blocks for extremely powerful quantum computers or be used as ultra-sensitive sensors.
Lorenzo Tesi, Friedrich Stemmler, Mario Winkler, Sherri S. Y. Liu, Saunak Das, Xiuming Sun, Michael Zharnikov, Sabine Ludwigs, Joris van Slageren: Modular Approach to Creating Functionalized Surface Arrays of Molecular Qubits, Advanced Materials, 35, 2208998 (2023)
Faculty 4,Johannes Rittmann: A clear view of material defects
You don't have to destroy things to search for possible damage. This is due to the availability of non-contact testing methods, such as active thermography. The problem, however, is that the heat waves used in this method tend to lose energy and the resulting images are often blurred. Johannes Rittmann has been working on a remedy for this with his work at the Institute of Polymer Technology. In his presentation "Seeing clearly thanks to thermographic glasses", Rittmann explained how he tackled the problem using lock-in thermographic measurement and was able to increase the efficiency of detecting specific details.
Johannes Rittmann and Marc Kreutzbruck: Lateral heat flux reduction using a lock‑in thermography compensation method, in: Scientific Reports (2023) 13:17093
Faculty 5, Philipp Ziegler: Compact current sensor
From cell phones to electric cars – these days, almost nothing works without electricity. Modern magnetic field-based current sensors are typically large, especially when designed for high currents. Philipp Ziegler thought that there must be a way to make these smaller. At the Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives, he developed a new type of compact current sensor which not only enables fast current development and a large bandwidth, it also shows no electrical inertia.
Philipp Ziegler, Yiru Zhao, Jörg Haarer, Johannes Ruthardt, Manuel Fischer, and Jörg Roth-Stielow: Compact Design of a Wide Bandwidth High Current Sensor Using Tilted Magnetic Field Sensors, IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, Vol. 59, No. 6, November/December 2023.
Faculty 6, Eric Price: Airships in action for animal welfare
Eric Price is dedicated to wildlife conservation through his work. One challenge in biodiversity preservation is safeguarding endangered cultural migrants. You must be able to observe an animal’s behavior in order to draw conclusions about how it might best be protected. But how might motion detection be made possible? Computer scientist Eric Price has developed a monitoring system at the Institute of Flight Mechanics and Controls that relies on the use of so-called blimps. These lightweight airships have a long flight duration and are particularly quiet. Equipped with a camera, they can gather a lot of information without disturbing the animals. Three blimps focus on one animal at a time. Sophisticated control technology is required for their joint, fully automated flight to succeed.
Eric Price, Michael J. Black, and Aamir Ahmad (2023): Viewpoint-Driven Formation Control of Airships for Cooperative Target Tracking, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (IEEE RAL), Vol. 8, No. 6, pp. 3653–3660.
Faculty 7, Florian Bienert: Lightsabers - a far cry from reality
Everyone is familiar with them: the lightsabers from George Lucas' films. However, the great filmmaker knew nothing about how laser beams really work. Florian Bienert knows this because laser beams have a caustic effect, i.e. they diverge. At the Institute of Laser Technologies, the prize winner examined two intersecting laser beams and developed a model for calculating their interference patterns. His work contributes to the development of universal laser machines.
Florian Bienert, Thomas Graf, and Marwan Abdou Ahmed: General mathematical model for the period chirp in interference lithography, Optics Express Vol. 31, No. 4 (2023), pp. 5334-5346.
Faculty 8, Prof. Dr. Andreas Kollross: Geodesic submanifolds
In his award-winning work, Prof. Andreas Kollross from the Institute of Geometry and Topology delves deep into a specialized field of mathematics: Topology concerns itself with the position and arrangement of geometric shapes within a space. Kolross investigates the "Classification of maximal geodesic submanifolds in exceptional symmetric spaces up to isometry".
Andreas Kollross and Alberto Rodríguez-Vázquez: Totally geodesic submanifolds in exceptional symmetric spaces, Advances in Mathematics Volume 418, 2023, 108949.
Faculty 9, Dr. Sidharth Ranjan: How spoken sentences are created
At the Institute of Linguistics, Dr. Sidharth Ranjan has taken on a topic that becomes all the more exciting the longer you think about it: How are sentences formed in the course of communication, how is the word order determined? Ranjan investigated these questions based on the Hindi language and provides answers in his work: "A bounded rationality account of dependency length minimization".
Sidharth Ranjan and Titus von der Malsburg (2023): A bounded rationality account of dependency length minimization in Hindi, in: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Sidney, Australia. Cognitive Science Society.“
Faculty 10, Dr. Franziska Maier: Participation does not necessarily drive reform
Do deliberation and participation in decision-making processes always lead to progressive results? Dr. Franziska Maier investigated this question together with Prof. Dr. André Bächtiger at the Institute for Social Sciences. The study comes to the surprising conclusion that participatory practices by no means automatically drive progressive reforms. Among the approximately 300 German citizens who participated in an experiment on the political rights of individuals with foreign citizenship, those who were initially skeptical remained firm in their stance after the exchange. Maier emphasized the importance of linking political rights with duties.
Franziska Maier and André Bächtiger: Reflecting on the boundaries of the demos: A virtual deliberative experiment with German citizens”, European Journal of Political Research 63 (2), 2023.
Double Prima! performance from Faculty 10
As in previous years, the Prima! Prize was presented on Research Day—this year, twice: Demet Cosmann and Ann-Kathrin Kapfenstein were honored for their Master's theses at Faculty 10. The Prima! prize, endowed with 1,000 euros, honors outstanding theses by female graduates at the university. It was set up to promote women's careers in science from the outset and to make these more visible. Dr. Grazia Lamanna, Equal Opportunities Officer at the University of Stuttgart, praised the high level of commitment and academic quality of the two prizewinners. In her work, Demet Cosmann looked at internal differentiation at German High Schools from the perspective of heterogeneity. She was inspired by her own experiences. "You have to do justice to all children" and "enrich differences", emphasized the prizewinner, who aims to improve learning conditions and teaching practices. Ann-Kathrin Kapfenstein dealt with "Growth Mindset Feedback" - a method that relies on praise and a positive error culture to encourage learners in their development.