Board of Trustees honours associates of the Georgia Augusta

Prize giving on the 4th of December 2008: Awards for special University-related activities and achievements

The Board of Trustees of the Georg-August-University Göttingen Foundation under Public Law has again honoured associates of the Georgia Augusta for special University-related activities and achievements this year: the prizes worth 2,500 Euro each were awarded in the categories “Fundraising for the Foundation University Göttingen” as well as “Science and the General Public”. Prizes were also awarded to two young academics who have drawn attention to themselves with outstanding publications. The prize giving by the Chair of the Boards of Trustees Dr. Wilhelm Krull took place on the 4th of December 2008 as part of the “University Speech Göttingen – Science and Responsibility”.



Awards for special University-related activities and achievements: The Chair of the Board of Trustees, Dr. Wilhelm Krull (fourth from left), with the prize winners of the year 2008


The Fundraising Prize was awarded to Prof. Dr. Jutta Gärtner and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Brück for their engagement in the establishment of the “German Centre for Multiple Sclerosis in Childhood and Adolescence” at the Faculty of Medicine Göttingen. The aim of this institution for research into the causes and treatment of juvenile MS is to establish the provision of specialist information and therapy. Diverse fundraising campaigns have already enabled the raising of substantial donations for the realisation of the Centre. Prof. Gärtner is director of the department Paediatrics III with a focus on neuropaediatrics, Prof. Brück heads the department of Neuropathology.

In the category “Science and the General Public” the prize was awarded to the researcher team under the direction of Prof. Dr. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, consisting of Dr. Gundolf Krüger, Privatdozentin Dr. Elfriede Hermann, Dr. Gudrun Bucher and Ulrich Menter from the Institute of Ethnology. They received the award for the scientific processing and publicly consumable publication of the Ethnology Collection. The presentation of the exhibits and cultural documents from the Cook/Forster Collection on Hawaii, in Canberra and in Paris as well as the exposition of the Baron von Asch Collection have particularly resulted in international acclaim.

A further prize recipient in this category is Prof. Dr. Anita Schöbel of the Institute of Numerical and Applied Mathematics. The scientist conducted research in the area of optimisation. The research focused on models and methods that can be applied in the traffic planning of local public transport. She thus transferred mathematical research fields from the theory of scientific scholarship into comprehensible, everyday life situations. In this way Prof. Schöbel developed a computer program that precisely calculates the optimum reaction to train delays and displays the consequences.

Two advancement awards of the Board of Trustees were this year awarded for outstanding publications of young scientists. Dr. Ursula Bergenthal from the department for German Philology received the award for her dissertation “The Young Wizard’s Arts. Harry Potter as Example for Literary Mass Communication in the Modern Media Society”. In her thesis supervised by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lauer she investigates the question of which prerequisites must be fulfilled by literature to appeal to a mass audience. A prize was also awarded to Doctorate student Jenny Krügel, who is a member of the working group of Prof. Dr. Nicolai Miosge in the department of the Prosthetics of the Centre for Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine. The subject of the award-winning publication is research into the matrix molecules nidogen-1 and nidogen-2. Here the Ph.D. student was able to show that these special molecules are present in the normal articular cartilage of humans and that nidogens play an important part in the course of osteoarthritis.