For invited guests

On June 19, 2026, this year’s eight award recipients 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 the following day.

TT-Prof. Dr. Lena Barra from Konstanz receives the Academy Prize for her work“Non-Canonical C16 Homoterpene Biosynthesis Widespread in Actinobacteria.” Dr. Anna Rosławska from Stuttgart isbeing honored with thePrize her work“Submolecular-scale control of phototautomerization .” This year, empirical cultural studies scholar Dr. Hannah Kanz (University of Freiburg) is being awarded thePrize 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 thePrize 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 beingPrize thePrize for her research on preventing the proliferation of the malaria pathogen. ThePrize 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 beingPrize with the HectorPrize for his work on gravitational-wave astronomy titled “Real-time inference for binary neutron star mergers using machine learning.”