New Alexander von Humboldt Professors selected

An Alexander von Humboldt Professorship which comes with up to €5 million in funding offers not only optimal financial conditions but also maximum flexibility for conducting leading-edge research in Germany. The recently selected award winners are to use Germany’s most valuable international research award to work for an extended period at a German university. 

The new award winners will now embark on appointment negotiations with the German universities that nominated them. They will receive their awards in 2024 following the successful conclusion of their negotiations. These universities are the FU Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, TU Braunschweig and the University of Freiburg and University of Potsdam.

The following individuals were selected to receive a Humboldt Professorship:

• The physicist and laser expert Fatih Ömer İlday will be switching to Ruhr-Universität Bochum. At present, he is a professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
• Juan Daniel Prades Garcia, physicist and metrology expert, was TU Braunschweig's successful candidate. He is currently a professor at the University of Barcelona in Spain.
• The health economist Ariel Dora Stern is slated to assume a chair at the joint Digital Engineering Faculty of the University of Potsdam and the Hasso Plattner Institute. She is a professor at the Harvard Business School in Boston, USA.
• Arnim Wiek, sustainability scientist at Arizona State University, USA, will be making the switch to the University of Freiburg where he will be a Humboldt Professor.

Additional funding will be available until the year 2024 for Humboldt Professorships in the field of artificial intelligence. These Humboldt Professorships can also focus on the societal, legal and ethical aspects of artificial intelligence.

The following researcher will receive a Humboldt Professorship for Artificial Intelligence:

• Peter N. Robinson, Professor of Computational Biology at  Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut, USA, will be expanding the expertise in computer-based genome analysis at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité. He was nominated by Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

During its meeting in April, the Selection Committee took decisions on 11 nominations. The second selection round for the 2024 Humboldt Professorships will be held in autumn 2023. 

Humboldt Professorships are awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and financed by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

(Press release 14/2023)

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 61 Nobel Prize winners.