DRESDEN Fellows 2015
Table of contents
"Summer Lunch" for the DRESDEN Fellows and Trefftz Professors with Rector Prof. Hans Müller-Steinhagen (front row, 2nd f.r.) on July 22, 2015 at TUD's Graduate Academy.
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Prof. Löfdahl (links) mit seinem Gastgeber an der TU Dresden, Prof. Bäker.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
October-December 2015
Prof. Lennart Löfdahl from the Chair of Thermal and Fluid Mechanics at Chalmers University of Technology in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, introduced his expertise in the field of automotive energy management and the relatively new research discipline of automotive thermal management to the Institute of Automotive Technologies at TU Dresden.
He also took part in the new course “Energiemanagement und Betriebsstrategien” (Energy Management and Operating Strategies). Moreover, he was involved in submitting an application to the HORIZON 2020 EU research programme “Zukünftiges Automobiles Energie- und Thermomanagement 2020” (Future Automotive Energy and Thermal Management), and in the DFG’s call for proposals for co-operative interacting automobiles.
Prof. Löfdahl has already been on frequent research visits abroad, including to the EPFL Lausanne, the ETH Zurich and MIT in Boston. He was also visiting professor at TU Dresden between 2010 and 2013.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
October/November 2015
David Muir Wood gained his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1974 at the Engineering Department and lectured there for several years. In 1987, he became Professor of Civil Engineering at Glasgow University (Head of the Department of Civil Engineering from 1991, and Dean of the Faculty from 1993 to 1994). In 1997, he accepted a Chair at the University of Bristol (and was Dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering there from 2003 to 2007). He subsequently became Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Dundee, retiring from his position in 2014. Since then, he has been Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Professor Muir Wood has been a visiting professor on several occasions and spent a number of longer research stays at top international universities, including the University of Colorado, the University of Minnesota, the University of Tokyo, Nagoya Institute of Technology and the University of Western Australia.
At TU Dresden, he focused on the mathematical description of mechanical soil behaviour and also held a seminar for PhD candidates and a public lecture on this topic.
In addition, he was involved in other research topics, including soil transport, erosion, structural effects and localisation of shear deformation.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
August/September 2015
Dr. Pawel Lochynski from the Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences is an expert in the field of electrochemical process engineering.
For the outstanding nature of his dissertation, he was awarded the “Tadeusz Zak Prize” of the Polish Electroplating Society (PTG) in 2014.
He already completed a successful three-month research stay at the Institute of Water Chemistry at TU Dresden in 2013.
During his recent stay, the 32-year-old was involved in the BMBF joint project NIRWINDU, which dealt with developing and testing measures to ensure sustainable drinking water supplies in India.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
April - August 2015
Dr. Barbara Hofer completed her dissertation on the description of geographic physical processes in 2010, at Technische Universität Wien. She has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Geoinformatics at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg since 2011, and is writing her habilitation thesis on “Potenzial und Nutzbarkeit von dienstebasierter Geoprozessierung” (Potential and Usability of Services-based Geo-Processing).
Together with scientists and PhD students at the Chair of Geoinformation Systems (Faculty of Environmental Sciences), Dr. Hofer focuses on the evaluation of web processing service profiles using a trans-disciplinary workflow.
Furthermore, she organisized international workshops jointly with her TU collegues. Moreover, she was involved in initialising and establishing new research projects to mark the start of a long-term collaboration in this field with the Paris Lodron University Salzburg.
DRESDEN Fellow Prof. Klaus Schützer (middle) in talks with Prof. Stelzer (left) and Rector Prof. Müller-Steinhagen (right)
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
Oktober - Dezember 2015 & Juli/August 2016
Timothy J. O'Donnell is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
His work focuses on developing mathematical models of language generalization, learning, and processing, and draws on theoretical ideas from linguistics, experimental methods from psychology, and computational modeling techniques from natural language processing, artifical intelligence, and machine learning.
He is the author of the recent MIT Press monograph "Productivity and Reuse in Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage".
Since 2012, he has collaborated with OTT Professor Martin Rohrmeier on applying ideas and tools from the study of language to problems of music cognition.
During his stay in Dresden, Dr. O'Donnell, Dr. Rohrmeier, and other members of the Dresden Music Cognition Laboratory extended and expanded this work, developing new theoretical tools for understanding aspects of musical structure such as harmony, voice leading, meter, and form.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
July/August 2015
Katrin Eling has been Assistant Professor of New Product Development at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands since 2013.
Her research visit at TU Dresden was a first step towards establishing a long-term collaboration between TUD's Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the research group Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship & Marketing (ITEM) at TU Eindhoven. For example, two joint research projects will deal with generating new ideas and improving the assessment of the success of innovations in the early stage of their development.
During her stay at TUD, Prof. Eling offered a seminar in the bachelor’s programme on “Market- and Design-Driven Innovation”, which was intended for students at the Faculty of Economics. Another PhD seminar “Theory Building” was targeted at doctoral candidates and junior researchers from the entire field of the humanities and social sciences.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
July/August 2015
The American professor Michael Fronda has been Professor of History at McGill University in the Canadian city of Montreal since 2010. Prior to this, he worked as a lecturer at two universities in Ohio (USA).
The ancient historian is an acknowledged expert in the field of Roman Italy and the Hellenic Mediterranean region, his main research interests being the Roman expansion, Romanisation and the Greek states. His teaching includes Early Byzantine History and Latin Language and Literature.
During his stay at TU Dresden, Michael Fronda held workshops on his specialist area, Roman Italy, in particular, the Republic and the early imperial age. In addition, he helped to establish a closer contact between the two universities.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
May - July 2016
John Storey, who is currently Professor of Cultural Studies and Associate Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland (UK) is among the most internationally well-known and acclaimed representatives of British Cultural Studies.
His research interests are the theory of Cultural Studies and the theory and analysis of popular culture and its development.
He is known to an international readership predominantly through his numerous introductions to the theory and practice of Cultural Studies. These have been translated into many languages, and his books are used in teaching throughout the world. At the moment, he is working on a history of popular culture in Great Britain, comprising several volumes.
John Storey already gave an introductory lecture in the winter semester of 2014/15 as part of the lecture series “Popular Culture” organised by the Chair of British Cultural Studies at TU Dresden. He has given several seminars on the development and analysis of popular culture at TU Dresden in the 2015 summer semester.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
April - July 2015
In 2011, Luisa Giacoma was awarded her doctorate at Turin University for a dissertation on phraseology and phaseography. She is co-author of numerous dictionaries in German-Italian lexicography.
Among these, the Großwörterbuch Italienisch-Deutsch/Deutsch-Italienisch (Zanichelli/ Klett 2001, 2009, 2014) which was awarded a prize by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, and the dictionary of idiomatic expressions, Idiomatik Deutsch-Italienisch, which was produced in close co-operation with an international team, stand out.
She has taught for a number of years at three of the most important universities in northern Italy (Milan, Turin and Verona), and regularly holds seminars and lectures at Europe’s most prominent universities and institutions.
From 2013, she has been the organiser of the panel discussion L’italiano e i suoi sconfinamenti for the Concorso Lingua Madre at the Turin International Book Fair.
She is a member of the scientific council of this competition.
Prof. Giacoma is also a regional ambassador for TU Dresden in Italy.
Her activities at TUD, in collaboration with the institutions of DRESDEN-concept, established phraseology - an important component of lexicography research - as an innovative research field.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
March - July & November 2015
From 2001 to 2013, Dr. Kirk was a lecturer of English and Scottish Language at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland).
Dr Kirk is from Britain and studied English and German at the universities of Bonn and Edinburgh before gaining his doctorate at Sheffield. The main focus of his work is the investigation of post-colonial varieties of English, and the comparison of German with English as a world language.
He is co-founder of the International Corpus of English (ICE), the most significant international variational linguistics project of the past two decades.
During his research stay, he offered seminars and workshops on his specialist area, corpus linguistics. He was also involved in advancing research projects at TU Dresden and entering into research collaborations.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
March - August 2015
Sergej Taškenov is a literary scholar and received his doctorate in 2009 at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He is research assistent at the Thomas Mann Chair of his home institution.
In 2011, he already spent some time at TU Dresden on an “Erasmus Mundus” Research Fellowship.
He prepared his habilitation thesis on “Pathologische Schreibcodes und psychiatrische Lesarten in Deutschland und Russland: Konturen, Kontinuitäten und Brüche einer Transfergeschichte” at TU Dresden, where he also made use of local archives.
Moreover, in the 2015 summer semester, he offered a seminar in German-Slavonic studies at the Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
March - August 2015
Dr. Amir A. Sepanji, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology in Tehran (Iran) was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Media and Communication at TUD.
In Tehran, he was, among other things, Dean at the Research Institute of Culture and Communication. His research interests are political communication, audience research, Islam, media and communication, and social research methods. He wrote his doctoral thesis, "Audience Phantasm", in the field of Communication Sciences. Prior to this, he successfully completed his Masters in Communication Science.
At TUD he collaborated on a project which dealt with the representation of Islamist terror in Iranian and German media. Dr. Sepanji also gave lectures as part of a series on media structures, and held his own seminar comparing the media systems in Iran and Europe.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
March - May 2015
David J. Trobisch is Professor for Biblical Theology. Since 2014 he has been director of the Green Collection, Oklahoma City (USA), the worldwide largest collection of hand-written bible texts.
As New Testament biblical scholar he is one of the leading text reviewers as well as an expert on Christian palaeography. As a representative of the American Bible Society, he is one of the five editors of the Novum Testamentum Graece, whose 29th edition he prepared in 2015.
Already in 2003, he has been a visiting scientist at TU Dresden and, during this time, had recognized the significance of a hand-written bible text in the collection of the Sächsischen Landes-, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB), the Codex Boernerianus. He also had discovered an unknown psalm text which he has examined closer during his DRESDEN fellowship.
The 56-year-old was born as the son of missionaries in Cameroun. After finishing school in Austria, he studied theology in Heidelberg. After his PhD studies, he worked as a scientist in the United States, amongst others at the Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
October/November 2015
Prof. Matthias Proske has been Professor of General Didactics and School Education (for the lower secondary level) at the Institute of General Didactics and School Research at the University of Cologne since 2009.
His research and teaching visit at TU Dresden tied in with the interdisciplinary collaboration project "Die soziale Praxis der Lehrerbildung“ (Social Practice in Teacher Training).
From 2012 to 2014, Prof. Proske carried out the project “Videogestützte Professionalisierung im (neuen) Lehramtsstudium” (Video-based Professionalisation in (new) Teacher Training), investigating the meaning of teaching videographies for the forming of analytical skills of teachers-to-be.
Furthermore, Prof. Proske was involved in the interdisciplinary project “Erziehungswissenschaftliche und fachdidaktische Reflexion und Gestaltung naturwissenschaftlichen Unterrichts" (Reflection and Organisation of Science Teaching in terms of Educational Science and Subject-specific Teaching Methodology) at the Faculty of Education. In role plays, students tried out their own teaching concepts and reflected on various perspectives of the collaborating educational sciences.
DRESDEN Fellow Dr. Sergej Taškenov (left), Dr. Ulrich Fröschle (middle) und DRESDEN Fellow Prof. Michael Fronda (right)
School of Engineering Sciences
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
October - December 2015
Professor Ewa Bulska has been a member of staff at the Faculty of Chemistry at Warsaw University ever since 1977. She has been a professor there since 1999 and Head of the Biology and Chemistry Research Centre since 2013.
She has used her research stay at TU Dresden to establish a close collaboration between the Dresden Center for Nanoanalysis (DCN) at TUD and her home university. To this end, she was involved in investigating the electrochemical, mechanical and optical states of various materials.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
June/July 2015
Massimiliano Di Ventra is an expert of world renown in the field of microelectronics, nanotechnology and biophysics.
In 1991, Prof. Di Ventra obtained his degree in Physics summa cum laude at the University of Trieste in Italy, and did his doctorate from 1993 to 1997 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland). In 2000, he became Assistant Professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (USA). He has been Professor of Physics at the University of California in San Diego since 2006.
The purpose of his research visit at the chair for material science and nanotechnology of Prof. Cuniberti in Dresden was to establish close research collaborations with the University of California. Prof. Di Ventra also gave lectures on the link between brain research and microelectronics at the TU Cluster of Excellence for Microelectronics, the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed).
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
May/June 2015
Dr. Fawzy Sherif is an expert in clothing technology from Menoufia University in Egypt. In 2011, he completed his dissertation at the Institute of Textile Machinery and High Performance Material Technology at TUD.
The result of his PhD, a cuff for splinting radial fractures, is now in the transitional phase between development and industrial production. The cuff is initially intended for use at the University Hospital in Dresden and is being supported in the test phase by the Saxon “Patentverwertungsagentur” (patent utilisation agency).
Dr. Fawzy Sherif also presented his product at various specialist trade fairs for textile technology in Frankfurt am Main, Aachen and Milan.
Moreover, he was involved in a research project aimed at protecting people from UV rays with the help of textile products.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
February - July 2015
Prof. Klaus Schützer has helped to launch the “BRAGECRIM” programme, which pools research in the area of “Industry 4.0”. At present, the School of Engineering Sciences is also setting up the cross-faculty Industry 4.0 research platform (with the support of the Institutional Strategy measure "Support the best").
Klaus Schützer contributes his special expertise in this field to the Dresden activities with the topic “Smart Components with Smart Production Processes and Environments”.
The 59-year-old Brazilian wrote his doctoral thesis at the Technische Universität Darmstadt from 1988 to 1995 and since then has returned repeatedly to Germany for research visits.
DRESDEN Fellow Dr. Barbara Hofer (background right)
School of Science
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
August 2015 - June 2016
Farahnaz Sadidi is a physics teacher from Tehran (Iran), who worked as a lecturer on the teacher training programme at the Farhangian University and was head of the education authority’s physics department in Tehran. She is also involved in various national and international research projects dealing with the didactics of physics as a school subject.
During her stay in Dresden, she was working at the Chair of Physics Didactics and at the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics, where she introduced her specific teaching and research approach, which combines physics with aspects of philosophy.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
June - August 2015
Prof. Alexander V. Kabanov is Director of the "Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery", Eshelman School of Pharmacy, at the University of North Carolina (USA) and Director of the "Laboratory of Chemical Design of Bionanomaterials" at the Lomonosov State University, Moscow (Russia). Prior to this, he worked for almost 18 years at the Medical Center of the University of Nebraska (USA).
The chemist, who was born in Moscow, is one of the world’s leading specialists for nanomedicine and drug delivery. He was collaborating with TUD Professor Rainer Jordan on a joint cancer research project for the American National Cancer Institute. He also has given a series of lectures and talks on nanomedicine and cancer research, and was involved in the work at the TUD Center for Bioactive Materials and Interfaces.
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
June - August 2015
Steven Tomsovic is Professor of Physics at Washington State University in the USA. During his three-month research stay as DRESDEN Fellow, he was working at the Center for Dynamics, where he also collaborated closely with the Institute of Theoretical Physics, the Department of Mathematics, and the Dresden Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems.
Over the past decade, Prof. Tomsovic has been an important collaboration partner for TU Dresden in the field of dynamic systems.
In 2006, he was Gutzwiller Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and in 2011 Fulbright Fellow at TU Dresden. From 2010 to 2013, he was Mercator Fellow at a DFG research group located in Dresden and operating throughout the whole of Germany.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
April - July 2015
Dr. Evgeniya Vavilova is a member of the academic staff at the Zavoisky Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Kazan. The Institute is a worldwide leader in the development and application of magnetic resonance methods in physics and chemistry.
In 2000, Dr. Vavilova won the “Zavoisky Award for young scientists working in the field of magnetic resonance” from the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. She has been to the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research (IFW Dresden) for scientific research visits on a number of occasions in recent years.
During her stay as DRESDEN Fellow, she has carried out nuclear magnetic resonance experiments on unconventional superconductors and quantum spin systems with spin fluid states. Dr. Vavilova has also familiarised herself with Mössbauer spectroscopy on molecular magnets and in order to introduce this method at her home university. Moreover, she has given a series of lectures on electron spin resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance in condensed matter.
DRESDEN Junior Fellow
December 2015 - May 2016
Dr. Kyung-youn Kim was awarded her doctorate at Seoul National University’s Faculty of Mathematics in August 2015. In her research, she investigates heat kernel estimates for Lévy-type processes.
During her DRESDEN Fellowship, Dr. Kim contributed to the "Graduate Lectures", which are targeted at MSc Students, PhD candidates and junior researchers, with a mini-course on heat kernel estimates. She also took on the supervision of Japanese and Korean exchange students studying on the PAJAKO Programme at TU Dresden during the autumn and winter of 2015.
DRESDEN Fellow Prof. John Storey (front left)
School of Medicine
DRESDEN Senior Fellow
March/April & June 2015
Christian Besimo is professor of dentistry. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1983, and submitted his habilitation thesis at Basel in 1993. He has been titular professor of dentistry at the University of Basel since 2004.
A renowned expert in the area of gerodontics, Prof. Christian Besimo is Head of the Department of Oral Medicine and Deputy Senior Consultant at Aeskulap Hospital in Brunnen. He also lectures in gerodontology at the University of Basel.
He has already developed curricula for the Universities of Graz (Austria) and Basel, and is the intended scientific director of the international post-graduate Master’s programme for gerodontology that is set up jointly at Dresden International University (DIU).
During his stay at TUD, Prof. Besimo was mainly entrusted with the description of the contents of the graduate and post-graduate inter-professional and inter-disciplinary curriculum for gerodontology.
TU Dresden's Institutional Strategy is funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments.