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Institute Awards
Scientific Awards

2019

2018

2017

2016

  • Laura Na Liu is the recipient of the 2016 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics for outstanding contributions to Nanooptics, Nanophotonics, Nano plasmonics, and Metamaterials. - More Information
    Laura Na Liu
  • Peer Fischer has received the 2016 World Technology Award for IT Hardware. Together with his group, he has developed new 3D nanofabrication methods and nanorobots, made the first reciprocal microswimmer, and realized the first swimming soft microrobot that moves using only body shape changes. - More Information
    Peer Fischer
  • Ernst Eckhard Koch Prize for Joachim Gräfe - More Information
    Joachim Gräfe
  • Joachim P. Spatz: has been honored with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Award 2017 of the German Research Foundation (DFG). - More Information
  • Hyeon-Ho Jeong was awarded the MRS Gold Graduate Student Award for a presentation on Chiral Plasmonic Nanosensors at the 2016 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. - More Information
    Jeong Hyeon-Ho
  • The paper "A Convex Model of Humanoid Momentum Dynamics for Multi-Contact Motion Generation" by Brahayam Ponton, Alexander Herzog, Stefan Schaal and Ludovic Righetti was Finalist for the Best Interactive Session Award at the 2016 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics. 10 finalists out of 283 submitted / 186 accepted papers.
    - More Information
    Brahayam Ponton Alexander Herzog Stefan Schaal Ludovic Righetti
  • The paper "Stepping Stabilization Using a Combination of DCM Tracking and Step Adjustment" by Majid Khadiv, Sébastien Kleff, Alexander Herzog, Ali Moosavian, Stefan Schaal and Ludovic Righetti was Finalist for the Best Paper Award at the 4th RSI International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics (ICROM).
    Majid Khadiv Alexander Herzog Stefan Schaal Ludovic Righetti
  • Moritz Grosse-Wentrup, Vinay Jayaram: IEEE Brain Initiative Best Paper Award at the IEEE SMC 6th Workshop on Brain-Machine Interface Systems, at the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Annual Conference in Budapest. - More Information
    Moritz Grosse-Wentrup Vinay Jayaram
  • Prof. Dr.Ir. Eric J. Mittemeijer: has been announced as honorary member of the German Society for Materials Science e. V.
  • Highly cited article: "A Quantitative Analysis of Current Practices in Optical Flow Estimation and the Principles Behind Them" by Deqing Sun, Stefan Roth, and Michael Black, is cited by Thompson Reuters as one of three highly cited articles published in the Int. J. of Computer Vision (IJCV) since 2014.
    Michael Black Deqing Sun
  • Daniel, C.; van Hoof, H.; Neumann, G..; Peters, Jan: Best Student Paper Award of ECML-PKDD 2016 for their paper: "Probabilistic Inference for Determining Options in Reinforcement Learning". - More Information
    Jan Peters
  • The FAUST dataset was awarded the "Dataset Award" at the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2016.  The award encourages and recognises the importance of the distribution of high-quality datasets on which geometry processing algorithms are tested. The creators of the dataset are Federica Bogo, Javier Romero, Matthew Loper, and Michael Black.  The work originally appeared in the  IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2014.    
    Federica Bogo Javier Romero Matthew Loper Michael Black
  • Hunter Gilbert receives a Humboldt Postdoctoral fellowship.
    Gilbert Hunter
  • Yunus Alapan and Hunter Gilbert received the Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship. 
    Yunus Alapan Gilbert Hunter
  • Xing Ma: receives the Günter Petzow Price 2016 for his outstanding research activities in the field of materials science.
  • Jonas Peters: elected New Member of the German "Young Academy". - More Information
    Jonas Peters
  • Simon Ebner Finalist for WODES 2016 Best Student Paper for the paper "Communication Rate Analysis for Event-based State Estimation" co-authored with Sebastian Trimpe.
    Simon Ebner Sebastian Trimpe
  • Bernhard Schölkopf: has been elected member of the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Science). - More Information
    Bernhard Schölkopf
  • Tian Qiu has been granted the “National Award for Outstanding Self-financed Chinese Students Abroad 2015” by the China Scholarship Council (April, 2016).
    Tian Qiu
  • Ludovic Righetti receives the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize 2016. It is awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It is considered the most prestigious award in Germany for early career researchers across all disciplines who have established an independent scientific career since having gained their doctorates. - More Information
    Ludovic Righetti
  • Ludovic Righetti receives the IEEE-RAS Early Career Award (Academic) for "his contributions to the theory of, and experiments in, robot locomotion and manipulation". It is awarded by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society to “individuals in the early stage of their career who have made an identifiable contribution or contributions which have had a major impact on the robotics and/or automation fields”. - More Information
    Ludovic Righetti

2015

  • The Middlebury Dataset was awarded the 2015 IEEE Mark Everingham Prize for service and contributions to the computer vision community. Michael Black was part of the team behind the optical flow benchmark.
    Michael Black
  • Ruth Urner: Best Paper Award at NIPS 2015 Workshop on "Transfer and Multitask Learning: Trends and New Perspectives" for Ruth Urner (and co-author Shai Ben-David).  
    Ruth Urner
  • Jakob Zscheischler: Köppen Award 2015, awarded by the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP, for his doctoral dissertation submitted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) in 2014. - More Information
    Jakob Zscheischler
  • Jonas Wulff.  Outstanding Reviewer Award.  ICCV 2015.
    Jonas Wulff
  • Vinay Jayaram: Second prize, "T3 Award - Thesis in 3" - category PhD students. 
    Title of the presentation: "Why can't we control computers with our minds yet?"
    Vinay Jayaram
  • Leonardo Casarsa: Second prize, "T3 Award - Thesis in 3" - category Master students. 
    Title of the presentation: "Can computers treat sick brains?"
    Leonardo Casarsa Azevedo
  • Paolo Malgaretti: 1st Prize at the "Thesis in Three" Competition in the Postdoc category
  • Barbara Haller: 1st Prize at the "Thesis in Three" Competition in the PhD category
  • Chantal Göttler: 1st Prize at the "Thesis in Three" Competition in the M.Sc. category
    Chantal Goettler
  • Ali Osman Ulusoy, Andreas Geiger, and Michael J. Black. Best Paper Award, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2015, for the paper "Towards Probabilistic Volumetric Reconstruction using Ray Potentials."
    Osman Ulusoy Andreas Geiger Michael Black
  • Andreas Geiger and Chaohui Wang: GCPR 2015 Best Paper Award
    Andreas Geiger Chaohui Wang
  • Matej Balog: Winner of Code Hunt programming contest at Microsoft Research PhD Summer School 2015.
  • Federica Bogo: Third prize at the Science2Start competition.
    Federica Bogo
  • Laura Na Liu: LIGHT2015 Young Women in Photonics Award: Fundamental Category
    Laura Na Liu
  • Congratulations to Tian Qiu, Andrew Mark, Debora Schamel, and Alejandro Posada whose video entry won the “Microrobotics Design Challenge” at the Hamlyn Symposium in London. (June, 2015). - More Information
    Debora Schamel Tian Qiu Andrew Mark Alejandro Posada Peer Fischer
  • Jakob Zscheischler: Otto-Hahn-Medal for his PhD Thesis "A global analysis of extreme events and consequences for the terrestrial carbon cycle", written at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen and the MPI for Biogeochemistry, Jena. - More Information
    Jakob Zscheischler
  • Michael J. Black: elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, class for engineering sciences. - More Information
    Michael Black
  • Wenqi Hu and Wendong Wang received the Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship. 
    Wenqi Hu Wendong Wang
  • Michael Hirscher: Hydrogen & Energy Award
    Michael Hirscher
  • Katharina Muelling: Award for Extraordinary Scientific Achievement for her Ph.D. thesis by the "Freunde der TU Darmstadt".
    Katharina Mülling
  • Samuel Sánchez: Princess of Girona Foundation Scientific Research Award 2015 - More Information
    Sámuel Sánchez
  • Eric Jan Mittemeijer: Adolf-Martens-Medaille - More Information
    Eric Jan Mittemeijer
  • Umut Sanli: SPIE Best Student Paper Award

  • Andrew Mark receives the 2015 Günter Petzow prize for his contribution to the development of nanoGLAD and its applications (e.g. Nature Materials 12, 802).
    Andrew Mark

  • Alumnus award: Our lab alumnus Assist. Prof. Bahareh Behkam at Virginia Tech in USA received the National Science Foundation CAREER award from the Biomedical Engineering program in 2015. Her award will focus on investigating immune cell-bacteria interactions in the cancer tumor microenvironment.
    Metin Sitti

  • Laura Na Liu: ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) for Research on Nanoplasmonics
    Laura Na Liu
  • Oliver Kroemer : Runner Up, 2015 Georges Giralt Award (Best European Robotics Ph.D. Thesis Award)
    Jan Peters
  • Jan Peters : ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) for Research on Movements of Humanoid Robotics (Project: SKILLS4ROBOTS)
    Jan Peters
  • Ludovic Righetti received an ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) for his project CONT-ACT: Control of contact interactions for robots acting in the world. - More Information
    Ludovic Righetti
  • Andreas Geiger: KIT Doctoral Award for his PhD thesis
    Andreas Geiger
  • Philipp Hennig: Emmy-Noether-Program "Probabilistic Numerics - Probabilistic Programming for Autonomous Systems"
    Philipp Hennig
  • Dorothea Brüggemann: Emmy-Noether-Program "Smart biomaterials from protein-based composite nanofibres"

2014

  • Andreas Geiger: Ernst-Schoemperlen-Prize for his PhD thesis, awarded by the KIT Center for Mobility Systems
    Andreas Geiger
  • Samuel Sánchez: Span. Innovationspreis 2014 des MIT Technology Review
    Sámuel Sánchez
  • Sebastian Trimpe: Klaus Tschira Award 2014 for Science Communication in the field of Computer Science - More Information
    Sebastian Trimpe

  • Taewon Seo and Metin Sitti received the IEEE/ASME Best Mechatronics Paper Award due to the paper on tank-like modular climbing robots using elastomeric dry adhesives.
    Metin Sitti

  • Uyiosa Abosomwan and Metin Sitti received the Best Poster Award in the Adhesion Conference due to the research poster on contact self-cleaning mechanics of gecko-inspired adhesives.
    Metin Sitti

  • Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel: Google European Doctorate Fellowship 2014-2016   - More Information
    Carl Johann Simon-Gabriel

  • Paper award: Tian Qiu, Debora Schamel, Andrew G. Mark, and Peer Fischer's paper "Active Microrheology of the Vitreous of the Eye applied to Nanorobot Propulsion" is the "Best Automation Paper Award - Finalist" of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation - ICRA 2014.  (June 2014) - More Information
    Tian Qiu Debora Schamel Markus Maier Peer Fischer

  • Peter A. van Aken: 1. Poster Award
  • Ilia Platzman: Günter Petzow Preis 2014
  • Metin Sitti became an IEEE Fellow due to contributions to micro- and nano-scale robotic systems.
    Metin Sitti
  • Laura Na Liu: Maier-Leibnitz-Preis der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft
    Laura Na Liu
  • Eric Diller, Zhou Ye, Guo Zhan Lum, Joshua Giltinan and Metin Sitti were selected as the Best Paper Award Finalist in the Robotics Science and Systems Conference due to the paper on novel six degrees-of-freedom actuation method for mobile magnetic microrobots.
    Zhou Ye Guo Zhan Lum Joshua Giltinan Metin Sitti
  • Matthew Woodward and Metin Sitti: Top 5 Most Read Papers of 2014 of the International Journal of Robotics Research journal for the paper entitled, "MultiMo-Bat: Biologically Inspired Integrated Jumping-Gliding Robot". 
    Matthew Woodward Metin Sitti
  • Stefan Schaal : IEEE Fellow 2014
    Stefan Schaal
  • M. Deisenroth (TU Darmstadt), P. Englert (Uni Stuttgart), J. Peters, D. Fox (U. Washington), IROS Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award
    Jan Peters
  • O. Kroemer (TU Darmstadt), H. van Hoof (TU Darmstadt), G. Neumann(TU Darmstadt), J. Peters, IROS Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award Finalist
    Jan Peters
  • A. Abdolmaleki  (Universidade de Aveiro), N. Lau (Universidade de Aveiro), G. Neumann(TU Darmstadt), J. Peters, 1st Place at the 3D Free Challenge of the RoboCup 2014.
    Jan Peters
  • Sebastian Weichwald and Timm Meyer best student paper award at the 4th International Workshop on Cognitive Information Processing (CIP 2014) for the paper: Decoding Index Finger Position From EEG Using Random Forests published with Bernhard Schölkopf, Tonio Ball, and Moritz Grosse-Wentrup.
    Sebastian Weichwald Timm Meyer
  • Moritz Grosse-Wentrup and Daniel Braun: Teaching Award Winter & Summer Term 2013/14 at Graduate School of Neural Information Processing, University of Tübingen 
    Moritz Grosse-Wentrup
  • Bernhard Schölkopf: Royal Society Milner Award 2014 - More Information
    Bernhard Schölkopf

2013

  • Michael J. Black: ICCV Helmholtz Prize 2013
    Michael Black
  • Gerard Pons-Moll: BMVC 2013 Best Science Paper for Metric Regression Forests for Human Pose Estimation with Jonathan Taylor, Jamie Shotton, Aaron Hertzmann and Andrew Fitzgibbon.
      - More Information
    Gerard Pons-Moll
  • Zumin Wang: Günter Petzow Prize 2013 - More Information
  • Manfred Fähnle: Lecturer Award of the Department of Physics at the University of Stuttgart
  • Karsten Borgwardt: Alfried-Krupp-Award for young professors
    Karsten Borgwardt
  • Laura Na Liu: Membership in the Elisabeth Schiemann-Kolleg of the Max-Planck-Society - More Information
    Laura Na Liu
  • Andreas Geiger: CVPR 2013 Best Paper Runner-Up Award
    Andreas Geiger

  • Andrew Mark, John Gibbs, John Lee, and Peer Fischer win the Ground breaking contribution award for their paper “Growth of chiral nanoparticles” at the International Conference on Chiroptical Spectroscopy in Nashville, TN, USA, 12 June 2013. - More Information
    Andrew Mark John Gibbs Tung Chun Lee Peer Fischer

  • David Flötotto: European Materials Research Society Young Scientist Award
  • Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez: outstanding paper award at NIPS 2013 for the paper: "Scalable Influence Estimation in Continuous-Time Diffusion Networks" in December 2013 
    Manuel Gomez Rodriguez
  • Jan Peters: Young Investigator Award of the International Neural Networks Society (INNS) in 2013. 
    Jan Peters
  • Jan Peters: Early Career Award of the IEEE Roboticsand Automation Society in 2013.
    Jan Peters
  • Jens Kober: Georges Giralt Award as the Best European Robotics PhD Thesis for his PhD Thesis "Learning Motor Skills: From Algorithms to Robot Experiments", supervised by Jan Peters.  
    Jens Kober
  • Jonas Peters: ETH Silver Medal for his PhD thesis "Restricted Structural Equation Models for Causal Inference".
    Jonas Peters
  • Thomas Schultz: MRM Distinguished Reviewer Award.
    Thomas Schultz
  • Juergen Gall: Emmy-Noether-Program
    Jürgen Gall

2012

  • Sebastian Kruss: Dr. Alexander and Dr. Rosemarie Bauer prize for the promotion of young academics (2012)
  • Ralf Richter: ERC Starting Grant (2012)
  • Ana García-Sáez: ERC Starting Grant (2012)
  • Laura Na Liu: Sofja Kovalevskaja Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2012)
    Laura Na Liu
  • Burcu Ögüt, Nahid Talebi, Ralf Vogelgesang, Wilfried Sigle and Peter A. van Aken: 2012 European Microscopy Society (EMS) Outstanding Paper Award for their article in Nano Letters, 2012, 12 (10), pp 5239–5244 - More Information
  • Eric J. Mittemeijer: gives "Samsonov Memorial International Lecture 2012" at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India (March 26, 2012)
  • Rico Bauer, Ewald Bischoff and E. J. Mittemeijer: Werner Köster Prize (DGM) for their outstanding paper in the „International Journal of Materials Research“ 102, 1027-1041 (2011)
  • Peter A. van Aken: Honorary Professorship at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Sputh Africa (2012)
  • Martin Noah: Artur Fischer Prize for outstanding Diploma Thesis (Materials Science), University of Stuttgart (2012)
  • Debora Schamel: Artur Fischer Prize for outstanding Diploma Thesis (Chemistry), University of Stuttgart (2012)
    Debora Schamel
  • Manfred Fähnle: Award for the best course lectures in the winter semester 2011/2012, Faculty of Physics, University of Stuttgart.
  • Manfred Rühle: Honorary Membership 2012 of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Elektronenmikroskopie (DGE)
  • Joachim Spatz: ERC Advanced Grant, in cooperation with Benny Geiger, Weizmann Institute, Israel (2012)
  • Clemens Bechinger: Extension of Max Planck Fellowship for further five years (2012)
  • Ulrike von Luxburg: Heisenberg Professorship (September 2012) 
    Ulrike von Luxburg
  • Jan Peters: Early Career Spotlight of the conference Robotics: Science & Systems (R:SS) in 2012.   
    Jan Peters
  • Jan Peters: Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence speaker at European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in 2012.
    Jan Peters
  • Christian Daniel, Gerhard Neumann, and Jan Peters: IROS CoTeSys Cognitive Robotics Best Paper Award, IROS 2012 Best Student Paper Award Finalist, and IROS 2012 Best Paper Award Finalist for "Learning Concurrent Motor Skills in Versatile Solution Spaces" at the International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems (IROS) 
    Jan Peters
  • Stefan Harmeling: Günter Petzow Prize of the Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems 
    Stefan Harmeling
  • Bernhard Schölkopf: Academy Prize 2012 of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
    Bernhard Schölkopf

2011

  • Claudio Rolli: 1rst prize in the category "animation / video" at the Max Planck Award 2011
  • Christian Eberhard: 3rd prize in the category "picture" at the Max Planck Award 2011
  • Philipp Nolte: 2nd prize "Nanowissenschaftspreis 2011" der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nanotechnologie-Kompetenzzentren in Deutschland (gefördert durch das BMBF)
  • Christian Böhm: 2. Preis beim Science2Start Ideenwettbewerb der BioRegio STERN (2011)
  • Silke Kurz: Artur-Fischer-Preis 2011
  • Xiaoke Mu: Best Poster Award at the Microscopy Conference 2011
  • Dr. Markus Rauscher: Günter Petzow Prize 2011
  • Peer Fischer: ERC Starting Grant (2012)
    Peer Fischer
  • Moritz Grosse-Wentrup and Bernhard Schölkopf: "Annual BCI Research Award" for their project "What are the neurophysiological causes of performance variations in brain-computer interfacing?" - More Information
    Moritz Grosse-Wentrup Bernhard Schölkopf
  • Thorsten Zander: Willumeit award for his Ph.D. thesis entitled "Utilizing Brain-Computer Interfaces for Human-Machine Systems".
    Thorsten Zander
  • Harold Christopher Burger, and Stefan Harmeling: DAGM 2011 Prize for "Improving Denoising Algorithms via a Multi-Scale Meta-Procedure". 
    Stefan Harmeling
  • Suvrit Sra: Best Paper Runner up Award in Data Mining at The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) 2011 for "Fast Projections onto L1,q-Norm Balls for Grouped Feature Selection".      
    Suvrit Sra
  • Jan Peters: Dick Volz Award Best 2007 US Ph.D. Thesis Runner-Up Award.
    Jan Peters
  • Suvrit Sra: SIAM Outstanding Paper Prizes for his paper "The Metric Nearness Problem," which appeared in the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX).
    Suvrit Sra
  • Gustavo Camps-Valls, Joris Mooij, and Bernhard Schölkopf: were selected for the 'IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society 2011 Letters' Prize Paper Award for "Remote Sensing Feature Selection by Kernel Dependence estimation".
    Gustavo Camps-Valls Joris Mooij Bernhard Schölkopf
  • Bernhard Schölkopf: Annual Max Planck Research Award
    Bernhard Schölkopf
  • Matthias Troendle : Molecular Physics Longuet-Higgins Young Author´s Prize 2011
    Matthias Tröndle
Note: for earlier awards (pre 2011) please see the individual department award pages.