Festive honours

At the University of Bayreuth, there is research, teaching and sometimes also honours. Like on Friday, 18 November 2022, when prizes for outstanding teaching, special research achievements, impressive social commitment and exciting sustainability ideas were presented at the Presidents Dinner.

The students of the Faculty of Engineering voted for Prof. Dr. Christina Roth in the last faculty election, which nominated her for the award across the university. A cross-faculty committee ultimately made the decision in favour of the award winner from the Chair of Materials Process Engineering.

The course "Fundamentals of Materials Processing" for materials scientists and materials technologists in the Bachelor's programme deserves special mention. In the lectures, industrial processing routes of diverse materials, material cycles and raw material creation are comprehensively illuminated.

In times of pandemic, digital sessions were used for this lecture, supported and supplemented by numerous media tools. Topic-focused, self-made videos for in-depth study played a decisive role here; they were variable in length and were used to explain entire topics, recapitulate individual mechanisms or visualise technically complex content. Learning objective checks for independent work ensured targeted learning progress. As the backbone of the course, several parallel scripts were made available, which approached individual topics from different points of view. All this was done with the intention of providing each member of the audience with the best possible support. Clear communication of expectations and the planned lecture structure creates a highly congenial working atmosphere.

This year, Prof. Dr. Eva M. Herzig, Junior Professor of Experimental Physics - Dynamics and Structure Formation, is awarded the "Bayreuth Teaching Prize for Digitally Supported Teaching". The award relates to the course entitled "Experimental Physics A".

The course was designed in a blended learning format according to the principle of the Flipped Classroom. The desired acquisition of competences was clearly formulated in terms of Bloom's taxonomy of learning. In order to bring the learning objectives, the teaching-learning activities during the course and the examination into good harmony, Herzig applied the concept of constructive alignment according to Biggs. The basic knowledge transfer took place via Moodle with the use of the digital tool Perusall (for collaborative annotation), the "test" activity (for self-examination with immediate feedback) and online applets from PhET (online physical experiments that can be carried out independently). In the face-to-face teaching sessions, the peer instruction method was used in conjunction with physical experiments to check students' understanding. In the face-to-face exercises, paper and pencil were used in discussion with the tutor. The online solution discussion was held via Zoom. With this mix of methods and the use of many different digital tools, students had many opportunities to work through the content and practice with a view to the desired acquisition of competences and the examination.

Overall, the course was evaluated positively by the students, as the various interactive methods and the digital teaching materials promoted access to and understanding of the material. The atmosphere conducive to learning, the interactive exchange among the students and the commitment of the teacher were rated particularly positively. 

Dyoniz Kindata, who completed his Master's degree in African Verbal and Visual Arts at the University of Bayreuth in 2022, impressed with his student achievements and social commitment and received the DAAD award for this.

His commitment to the Model African Union (MAU) is particularly noteworthy. In 2020 and 2021, he was also elected president of the Association Model African Union in Bayreuth, an association of students that has been growing since 2015 and critically examines socio-political issues in Africa. The president of the MAU has to take on a variety of organisational tasks with a committee, especially corresponding with institutions (such as universities, the African Union, etc.) in order to recruit speakers. Under Kindata's presidency, the MAU was particularly concerned with bringing Africa and Africa-related issues closer to the German public, for example through visits to schools in Bayreuth.

Dyoniz Kindata was an exemplary advocate for other students, took on the role of programme spokesperson, looked after Erasmus students and mediated in cases of accusations of racism.

Dr. Sergio Romero Romero is a very active, consistent and open-minded scientist who is very passionate and committed to scientific research, but also to public education and integration, for which he receives international recognition.

In his current research project, Romero Romero has set himself the goal of producing a functional vitamin B12-binding chimera from fragments of various protein folds. In general, he is concerned with fundamental questions of protein folding, evo- lution and protein design.

In addition to these outstanding research achievements, he is distinguished by his commitment to teaching, mentoring and outreach. Romero Romero is a mentor for students and colleagues alike. He has not only taken on his teaching position at the University of Bayreuth with full commitment, but also maintains ties with his two Mexican universities, where he continues to teach remotely. 

The City of Bayreuth Prize is awarded annually to a maximum of three candidates from different faculties of the University of Bayreuth for outstanding dissertations.

Dr. Saleh Aljadeeah receives the Bayreuth City Prize for his doctoral thesis "Access to and use of medicines among Syrian asylum seekers and refugees in Germany and the population with government health insurance in Syria", which was awarded summa cum laude. The thesis was written at the Institute for Medical Management (IMG) in cooperation with the Boston University School of Public Health, supervised by Prof. Dr. mult. Eckhard Nagel and Prof. Dr. Veronika Wirtz.

In his outstanding dissertation, Dr. Saleh Aljadeeah investigated on the one hand the access of Syrian refugees or asylum seekers to medicines and their use of medicines after their arrival in Germany and on the other hand the supply of the Syrian population in their home country. The aim was to record the barriers to access to medicines and the use of medicines by Syrian refugees and to compare these with the situation in Syria itself.

The prize of the city of Bayreuth was awarded to Jessica Lindner for her doctoral thesis, which was awarded summa cum laude, in which she dealt with the acquisition of written German in different language acquisition contexts. The title of the thesis is: "The expression of specific antecedent skills and their influence on written language acquisition in German in the context of monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition as well as second language acquisition. An empirical longitudinal study of two cohorts in the first year of primary school - also from the perspective of regular and pandemic schooling". Lindner convinced three reviewers with her work due to its outstanding scientific quality as well as its forward-looking relevance to educational policy and society.

The prize of the City of Bayreuth was awarded to Dr. Sebastian Steibl for his doctoral thesis on "Atoll Island as ecosystems replicates: organisation of biodiversity and environmental impacts of different human land uses" at the Chair of Animal Ecology I, which was awarded summa cum laude. Steibl presents a completely new approach to investigating how biodiversity and species distribution are organised at the ecosystem level and how human influences change them: he uses islands as model systems, or rather three atolls of the Maldives Islands - which are used differently but are subject to similar natural conditions due to their proximity to each other. This approach makes it possible for the first time to document how differently human interventions and degrees of use affect a respective system and how the complexity of ecosystem and human degree of use can be addressed at the research level. Dr Steibl thus provides an essential research basis that will allow an even deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms of species distribution.

Dr Tom Kaden is an extremely talented researcher and broad-based sociologist with a clear focus on qualitative research profiled in cultural sociology.

Dr Kaden positions himself in a decidedly interdisciplinary environment with clear links to history, religious studies and communication and media studies in particular, and has numerous working relationships with researchers in other disciplines. In addition to his research in the sociology of culture and religion, which is reflected in particular in his doctorate on the relationship between religion and science, the native of Annaberg-Buchholz is distinguished by studies on the sociology of conflict and power. Kaden publishes in German and English and has a remarkable publication record for his academic age.

In addition, Dr. Kaden, who was a post-doctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary project "Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum" at York University in Toronto from 2014 to 2017, has broad inter- national teaching and research experience.

In his habilitation project with the working title "Authoritative Power and Political Influence. On the Sociology of Digital Propaganda", Kaden is researching a highly topical issue: the subject of his investigations are the internet memes circulated by the Russian-controlled internet agency IRA, which were intended to influence the 2016 US election campaign in favour of Donald Trump. Kaden is not only dedicated to clarifying the background of this campaign, the relevance of which can hardly be overestimated against the backdrop of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. He has developed a procedure that is as complex as it is meticulous to analyse these forms of text-image combinations in breadth and depth, using a combination of quantifying and hermeneutic methods.

• 1. Place: Markus Oehme
• 2. Place Raphael Fenski
• 3. Place Sarina Spiegel

Markus Oehme won first place in the University of Bayreuth's Sustainability Award for Theses with his Master's thesis on "Validation of the suitability of electrical impedance spectroscopy in combination with machine learning for the detection of nitrate in soil samples". The supervisors of the thesis were Professor Dr.-Ing. Gerhard Fischerauer and Luca Bifano from the Department of Measurement and Control Technology.

The second place of the Sustainability Award of the University of Bayreuth for final theses was awarded to Raphael Fenski with his bachelor thesis on "How can corporate success be measured in a systemic context? - Development of an impact measurement tool based on the Stellar Approach". The supervisor of the thesis was Prof. Dr. Dr. Alexander Brink, Professor of Business Ethics. The thesis was written in cooperation with the management consultancy The Dive.

The third place of the Sustainability Award of the University of Bayreuth for final theses was awarded to Sarina Spiegel with her bachelor thesis on "Barriers and Challenges of the Implementation of Nature-based Solutions in German Cities and How to Overcome Them". The supervisors of the thesis were Professor Dr. Martin Leschke, Professor of Economics V esp. Institutional Economics at the University of Bayreuth, and Dr. Valerie Graf-Drasch from the Business Informatics Department of Fraunhofer FIT.

As part of the target agreements between the university management and the faculties for the implementation of equal opportunities for women and men (1st round: 2013-2017, 2nd round: 2018- 2022), the University of Bayreuth annually awards the prize for the advancement of women to its faculties. For the duration of five years in each case, concrete key figures for increasing the proportion of women at different levels were defined with the individual faculties in the target agreements and tailored measures were designed to be implemented during the period of the target agreements.