Honoring the best: TU Dortmund awards the Hans Uhde Prizes 2025!

Honoring the best: TU Dortmund awards the Hans Uhde Prizes 2025!

On May 13, 2025, outstanding graduates were awarded the renowned Hans Uhde Prize at the Technical University of Dortmund. The award ceremony took place in the presence of Dr. Tim-Philip Eisenhardt, the head of the human resources department at thyssenkrupp Uhde and the Dortmund site manager, and Professor Manfred Bayer, the rector of the TU Dortmund. The Hans Uhde Prize is awarded annually by the Hans Uhde Foundation and has established itself as an important award for excellent achievements in various engineering and natural sciences.

A total of four students from TU Dortmund were honored for their outstanding theses. Among them was Collin Johnson from the Faculty of Biological and Chemical Engineering (BCI), who received the prize for his thesis “State Estimation for Neural Network System Models with Bayesian Last Layer”. Guido Baranowski, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Hans Uhde Foundation, presented him with a certificate and a gold coin. Johnson's research focuses on state estimation in probabilistic data-based models, which is essential for the effective control of processes. Its methodology enables quick evaluations and provides important uncertainty information.

Awards for diverse achievements

In addition to Collin Johnson, four other graduates were honored for their work. Nils Altenburg, from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, received the prize for his research on “Machine Learning-Enabled Imputation of Channel Measurements for 5G Connectivity Maps”. Jan Phillip Detke from mechanical engineering was honored for his “Theoretical and experimental investigation of atomized liquids for cooling in screw compressors”. Felix Stegmaier, also from the Faculty of Computer Science, was honored for his work on “Inter-procedural Static Analysis for Unsafe Rust using PhASAR”. Reghuram Venugopal, who wrote his thesis in the field of biological and chemical engineering, received the award for his research on “Uncertainty Quantification of Surrogate Models for Robust Model Predictive Control”.

In addition, four graduates of the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences were also honored: Steffen Röttger, Sebastian Rosewick, Fabienne Stahl and Nick Schuto. Dr. Rolf Siefert was honored for over 25 years of outstanding performance at thyssenkrupp Uhde GmbH.

Importance of the award ceremony

The Hans Uhde Foundation has been awarding prizes for excellent school and academic achievements for 39 years. These awards not only highlight individual achievements, but also promote science and education by supporting promising talent. Science awards are not only recognition, but also an opportunity for award winners to network with other experts and improve their career prospects. According to the University of Hohenheim, many science prizes offer, in addition to cash and non-cash prizes, exclusive networking opportunities that can be important for the prize winners' careers.

The award ceremony event was enriched by Maximilian Spiekermann, a representative of the start-up “Simplyfined”, who spoke about the optimization of vegetable oils into bio-based platform chemicals. This highlights the synergy between research, innovation and industrial practice that such celebrations focus on.