On July 8, Prof. Dr. Enkhzaya Chuluunbaatar, former PhD student of TUD's Faculty of Business and Economics, was personally awarded the Polar Star, the state order, by the President of Mongolia, Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükhüch, for her services to the development of Mongolia's education system.

Prof. em. Dr. Alexander Karmann, former TUD doctoral supervisor of Prof. Enkhzaya, learned this on the occasion of his recent visit to the German-Mongolian Institute of Technology (GMIT).  Prof. Enkhzaya was a former DAAD scholarship holder at TUD, where she initially completed her diploma equivalent work at the Faculty of Business and Economic and then as research and teaching associate did her doctorate in 2004 with an interdisciplinary thesis on banking regulation and informal credit decisions: based on institution-economic reasoning, concept mapping, a method from occupational psychology, was applied to separate informal from formal rules of the game within credit decision making processes.

In Mongolia, Prof. Enkhzaya was initially a member of the binational founding committee of GMIT - after working as a advisor for the Government, the World Bank, GTZ, etc. - and has been head of the industrial engineering program there since her appointment as professor.

In discussions with GMIT industrial engineering graduates, Prof. Karmann learned of the great interest that students there have in working in the fields of project management, mining logistics, planning and construction, as well as in doing internships with German companies. The GMIT, which is co-financed by the BMZ, is now well-established as a reference model in the Mongolian higher education system. Incidentally, in the further development of GMIT curricula  was involved another representative of TUD, Prof. Dr. Rainer Lasch, the long-term Dean of Industrial Engineering and Management  at the Faculty of Business and Economics.