For invited guests

On June 19, 2026, this year’s eight award winners will introduce themselves and present their award-winning work. The awards will be presented during a festive ceremony at the Annual Celebration, which takes place one day later.

TT-Prof. Dr. Lena Barra from Konstanz will receive the Academy Prize for her work Non-Canonical C16 Homoterpene Biosynthesis Widespread in Actinobacteria. Dr. Anna Rosławska from Stuttgart will be honored with the Karl Freudenberg Award for her work Submolecular-scale control of phototautomerization . This year, empirical cultural studies scholar Dr. Hannah Kanz (University of Freiburg) is being honored with the Walter Witzenmann Award for her dissertation Offline-Sein. An Ethnography of Practices of Disconnection. TT-Prof. Dr. Benjamin Schäfer from Karlsruhe is being awarded the Ecology Prize of the Viktor & Sigrid Dulger Foundation. He is working to increase the stability and resilience of the power grid through transparent, explainable AI methods. The title of his work is “Data-driven load profiles and the dynamics of residential electricity consumption.” Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Christian A. Neumann from Heidelberg, who is being honored with the Manfred Fuchs Award for his interdisciplinary work at the intersection of history and the life sciences (gerontomedieval studies), focuses on the topic of age and aging among medieval rulers. Dr. Franziska Hentzschel, also from Heidelberg, is being honored with the Otto Schmeil Award for her research on preventing the proliferation of the malaria pathogen. The Manfred-Lautenschläger Award goes to Joey Rauschenberger, M.A., for his dissertation titled Reparations for Sinti and Roma: A History of the Practice of Compensation for Nazi Injustices in Baden-Württemberg, 1945–1980. He also works at Heidelberg University. Dr. Maximilian Dax from Tübingen is honored with the Hector Foundation Award for his work on gravitational-wave astronomy titled Real-time inference for binary neutron star mergers using machine learning,.