My current workplace, the University of Cologne, grants every year 3 “future” awards to individual researchers based on their excellent research activities in the last couple of years. Each of the prices is awarded to a senior researcher, who are usually already Professors, and a “junior” researcher, who are mostly post-doc or Junior-Professors. There are 3 different awards for the different scientific disciplines: the Max Delbrück-Award for Nature- and Lifesciences, the Leo Spitzer-Preis for Humanities and the Hans Kelson-Award for Law and Economic Sciences.
I am the proud recipient of the Max Delbrück-Award for young researchers of the University of Cologne for 2018. This is not only a great honor, but also comes with a relative large grant money (96.000 € over 2 years), which is unusual for this kind of award, but is made possible by the participation of the University of Cologne in the German-wide excellence-initiative. This additional research money will be of great use for further building our high pressure mineral physics laboratory, buying a lot of diamonds (they somehow break all the time), and several travels to synchrotron facilities.
I am also very thankful to my PhD supervisor Prof. Falko Langenhorst, who came for the award ceremony to give a 8 minute laudatio about my past achievements.
The University of Cologne also made a short video of me in which I explain my research: