The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize this year. The ceremony on 5 June will also honour the six prizewinners for 2007. One woman and five men will receive awards of 16,000 euros each. Choosing from a candidate pool of 80 young researchers, including 28 women, the selection committee was most impressed by an astrophysicist, a fluid mechanics engineer, a clinical pharmacologist, an experimental physicist, a computer scientist, and a microbiologist. The prize is named after former DFG president and nuclear physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, it is awarded annually to six young researchers.
The 2007 prizewinners are:
Dr. Eric Bell (31), astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg
Eric Bell works in the field of observational cosmology. He investigates one of the key questions in his discipline: How did galaxies develop after the Big Bang? To directly observe and analyse the history of the universe, he examines distant galaxy populations. Bell was able to develop a standard method for estimating the masses of far distant galaxies and thus solved a long-standing astronomical problem. He also discovered that the majority of the most massive galaxies have formed almost no new stars for seven billion years. This finding is at odds with theoretical expectations and has led to a number of new approaches in research. After working in the UK and the US for many years, Eric Bell now heads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether independent junior research group and represents his institute at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an international project that measures celestial objects.
Dr. Michael Dumbser (29), fluid mechanics, University of Stuttgart
Numerical simulation of flow is a basic method for many applications that require high-precision
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Contact: Dr. Eva-Maria Streier
em.streier@dfg.de
49-228-885-2250
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
20-Mar-2007