TU Dortmund University Awards Rudolf Chaudoire Prize

Dr. Miriam Schad has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences since 2017, where she is dealing not only with social inequality but also environmental sociology and sustainability research. She is currently focusing, among other things, on the question of which social conflicts develop in ecological transformation processes such as the energy transition. This includes phenomena such as protests and action groups against wind power or solar parks. “I’m currently interested in how the development of the hydrogen industry is negotiated by society,” says Dr. Schad. Local debates in Spain, for example, show what great hopes are pinned on green hydrogen from solar energy. She aims to use her prize money to finance research visits at the Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal and the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain.

Dr. Christoph Lohmann has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Applied Mathematics and Numerics in the Department of Mathematics since earning his doctoral degree in 2019. He develops algorithms that can be used for modeling in fluid mechanics, for example to calculate the aerodynamic drag of automobiles or blood flow in the vascular system. He optimizes numerical methods in such a way that they can make the best possible used of supercomputers’ performance capacity. One strategy is to amplify the problem artificially in order to solve it as quickly as possible. What sounds paradoxical at first has the effect in practice that thousands of computing kernels switched in parallel can work simultaneously and thus solve the problem at different points in time and place. “Globally and temporally acting flow solvers” is the technical term for this approach. With his prize money, Dr. Lohmann intends to finance a research stay at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA. 

Prize funds research visits abroad

Professor Manfred Bayer, President of TU Dortmund University, and Dr. Gert Fischer, Member of the Board of Directors of the Rudolf Chaudoire Foundation, gave the welcoming addresses at the award ceremony. Professor Nele McElvany, Vice President Research at TU Dortmund University, announced the winners. In keeping with tradition, a former prizewinner held the keynote speech. This year it was the mathematician Professor Dominik Göddeke from the University of Stuttgart. In his speech, he looked back at the early days of his academic career to show that risk and chance also play a role on the road to success. For example, he got involved early on with developments that had previously been little more than a mad idea but then became megatrends, such as scientific computing with graphics processors. He concluded his talk with an appeal not to forget the good things in life in the face of scientific effort and showed a photo of the beautiful blue sea near Marseille in southern France, where he had spent a research stay about ten years ago with funds from the Chaudoire Prize .

The Rudolf Chaudoire Foundation was born out of the legacy of Rudolf Chaudoire, an industrialist based in the Ruhr region who was passionate about fostering vocational education and training for young people. Since 1995, the foundation has made generous funds available on a regular basis, and proceeds from it fund the annual Rudolf Chaudoire Prize awarded to young academics at TU Dortmund University. The purpose of the prize money is to support research projects abroad. To date, 56 scientists from TU Dortmund University have been commended.

Impressions from the award ceremony