Oct 20, 2025
Honorary doctorate for Prof. Dr. Dr. Dominik Faust - University of Seville recognizes outstanding scientific achievements
Prof. Dr. Dr. Dominik Faust during his speech at the award ceremony for his honorary doctorate.
On October 3, 2025, the University of Seville honored Prof. Dominik Faust from the TUD Dresden University of Technology (TUD) with its highest academic distinction and awarded him an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa - Dr. h.c.). The traditional Spanish university is thus recognizing his outstanding contributions to society as a whole. During the award ceremony, Prof. Faust was honored as a "personality of international renown in the fields of physical geography, geomorphology, soil science and quaternary geology". The award is also particularly significant due to its rarity, as this is only the second honorary doctorate to be awarded at the Faculty of Geography and History since its reopening after the Spanish Civil War.
Presentation of the doctoral cap.
On October 3, 2025, the University of Seville honored Prof. Dominik Faust from the TUD Dresden University of Technology (TUD) with its highest academic distinction and awarded him an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa - Dr. h.c.). The traditional Spanish university is thus recognizing his outstanding contributions to society as a whole. During the award ceremony, Prof. Faust was honored as a "personality of international renown in the fields of physical geography, geomorphology, soil science and quaternary geology". The award is also particularly significant due to its rarity, as this is only the second honorary doctorate to be awarded at the Faculty of Geography and History since its reopening after the Spanish Civil War.
In his laudatory speech, Dr. Fernando Diaz del Olmo, Head of the Department of Geography at the University of Seville and sponsor of the award, praised Prof. Faust as an internationally recognized specialist in research and teaching in the fields of physical geography, geomorphology, soil science, geoarchaeology and Quaternary stratigraphy. He described these as topics and research areas which, based on geography as the central discipline, share their multidisciplinary content with both the geosciences and the humanities. He called Prof. Faust "from now on part of the institutional history of Physical Geography at the University of Seville" and thanked him for his contribution to the training of students and researchers at the university.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Dominik Faust with Dr. Fernando Diaz del Olmo, Head of the Geography Department at the University of Seville and sponsor of the award.
Prof. Faust can look back on a long career at the TUD and an impressive research career. Since 2000, he has been Professor of General Physical Geography at the Institute of Geography at TUD. From 2011 to 2019, he served as Director of the Institute of Geography. Since his retirement in April 2020, he has headed three DFG projects as a retired Chair of Physical Geography with a Focus on Paleoenvironmental Research at the Heisenberg Chair of Physical Geography. Numerous successes underpin his scientific work: over 180 publications in international journals, authorship of two textbooks, membership of the editorial board of several renowned journals and the management of 20 DFG research projects.
Prof. Faust has been a member of several research institutes at the University of Seville and has supervised and trained students and researchers in lectures, field and laboratory exercises, conferences, doctoral courses, Erasmus programs, internships and university seminars since at least 1989.
During his many years of research, his focus has often been on projects with a spatial fixation on the Mediterranean region, which is why Prof. Faust is also considered an expert on the Iberian Peninsula. Dr. Fernando Diaz del Olmo remarked in his laudation that "after Lautensach, I know of no other German physical geographer who has worked so intensively on the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands and the whole of Spain as our dear "German-Andalusian" Prof. Dominik Faust. I am counting on him if the proposed Institute for Cultural Heritage and Quaternary Studies at the University of Seville is approved."