In publica commoda

Press release: University honours members for special activities and achievements

No. 36/2011 – 2nd March 2011

Prizes from the Foundation Council in 2010 – total value of 20,000 euros


Last night, the Chairman of the Foundation Council, Dr Wilhelm Krull, awarded the Foundation Council's prizes for 2010 at a special awards ceremony. The awards, eight in total, each carry a prize of 2,500 euros, and were this year presented in the categories of "Outstanding Commitment to University Teaching", "Science and Publicity" and "Outstanding Publications by Young Talent". Each year, the Foundation Council of the Georg-August-University Göttingen Public Law Foundation distinguishes members of the Georgia Augusta for special activities and achievements at the university. The funds for these prizes are generated by Foundation Council members waiving the expenses allowances that they would have received for their work on the Foundation Council.

In the prize category "Outstanding Commitment to University Teaching", three people and initiatives received awards for new concepts in the area of teaching and learning culture. Only students of the University of Göttingen are entitled to nominate in this category. Prof. Dr Thomas Mann, Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, received the award for "Moot Court", an annual event that he initiates and organises himself in the area of administrative law. Moot Court is a type of role play, in which students can act out an administrative law case under real conditions, from the initial decision through to a simulated trial.

Dr Tobias Pukrop and Dr Tobias Raupach, assistant doctors at the University Medical Center Göttingen, also received the award in the same category. Dr Pukrop and Dr Raupach have dedicated themselves to improving the quality of medical training at the University Medical Center. They have initiated several projects in which students were deployed as teachers and lecturers, for example. In addition, they formulated a catalogue of learning objectives for the clinical course section, along with an evaluation concept for the courses.

The award in this category also went to the project team of the "Elektronische Publikationsplattform für Studierende – Litlog" (Electronic publication platform for students – Litlog) at the Seminar for German Philology, represented by Janet Boatin, Peer Trilcke and Kai Sina. Litlog is an online magazine in which students and PhD students at the Faculty of Philosophy can publish book discussions, essays, scientific articles, and reports on cultural life in and around Göttingen. All contributions are discussed in writing workshops and in an online forum before publication.

The prize category "Science and Publicity" honours initiatives that convey scientific working processes and new knowledge to the public. The Göttingen Graduate School of Social Sciences (GGG), represented by Prof. Dr Rainer Marggraf and Prof. Dr Kilian Bizer, was honoured in this category. Last year, the SME-network of the GGG organised the three-part event series "Praxisforum 2010 – Wir verbinden kluge Köpfe" (Practical forum 2010 – we unite intelligent minds), which brings together PhD students and representatives from regional companies. The aim of the series was to provide the researchers with feedback on how their research relates to practice, while at the same time enabling companies to meet potential future employees and managers.

The Foundation Council again awarded four prizes for "Outstanding Publications by Young Talent". Dr Christian Böhning, from the Courant Research Centre "Higher order structures in mathematics", was recognised for his publication "Rationality of the moduli spaces of plane curves of sufficiently high degree", which he wrote together with Dr Hans-Christian Graf von Bothmer and which was published in the journal "Inventiones Mathematicae". In the publication, the authors combine methods of classical algebraic geometry with those of computer algebra in order to demonstrate the rationality of the moduli spaces of plane algebraic curves of sufficiently high degree, among other things.

The neuroscientists Dr Jan Christoph Koch and Dr Johanna Knöferle, from the University Medical Center Göttingen, were jointly awarded the prize for their paper "Mechanisms of acute axonal degeneration in the optic nerve in vivo", which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In their publication, Dr Koch and Dr Knöferle study the mechanisms of early axonal degeneration after traumatic damage, such as that experienced with the onset of paraplegia. To this end, they established a new procedure with which they could initially observe these processes in real-time in the optic nerve of living animals before investigating the underlying mechanisms more closely.

Prof. Dr Tatyana Krivobokova from the Courant Research Centre "Poverty, Equity and Growth in Developing Countries" was honoured for her publication "Simultaneous confidence bands for penalized spline estimators", which was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. In her publication, she attempts to determine how confidence bands can be statistically calculated in a quick and clear way for non-parametric regression problems.

The historian Dr Eva-Maria Silies was recognised for her dissertation entitled "Love, lust and burden. The pill as a female generational experience in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960-1980", written on the University of Göttingen's graduate programme “Generation History". In the publication, Dr Silies examines the introduction of the pill in Germany, not just as a political and social problem, but also as a generational experience of young women in the 60s and 70s.