Awards and Honors
Dr. Tuğçe Aral was awarded the 2025 Margret and Paul Baltes Prize for one of the two best dissertations in developmental psychology by the German Psychology Society’s Developmental Psychology Division.
Societies worldwide are becoming increasingly diverse, yet inequities remain deeply rooted. In her dissertation, Dr. Tuğçe Aral examined where and how ethnic-racial socialization occurs in inequitable societies and how it shapes youths’ development of racial knowledge. Her work also addresses the significant gap in research on these issues in Germany and throughout Europe. Her cumulative dissertation comprises four articles published in internationally recognized journals. In 2024, the dissertation was also shortlisted for the University of Potsdam’s Better World Award.
Tuğçe Aral completed her doctorate at the Inclusive Education Department of the University of Potsdam, where she is now a postdoctoral researcher. She also serves as a non-resident research fellow at the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER), part of the Leibniz Education Research Network in Germany.
Prof. Andreas Zimmermann has been appointed by the German government as a conciliator at the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) for the period spanning 2025 to 2031. In addition to his academic work, the international law expert has already acted as an ad hoc judge or as a party representative in international court proceedings on several occasions.
The OSCE's Court of Conciliation and Arbitration has existed since 1995 and is intended to help resolve disputes between the 57 member states amicably if they agree to appoint their arbitrators or conciliators to that end. In addition to Germany, Albania, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, and Poland had also appointed their representatives to the Court following the expiry of their previous mandates. They perform their duties in a personal capacity and are completely independent and impartial.
Prof. Dr. Annegret Thieken was awarded the 2025 Plinius Medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) forher outstanding contributions to the understanding and mitigation of flood risks and the development of municipal adaptation strategies.
Annegret Thieken is a leading figure in the field of modern understanding of flood risks and the design and implementation of risk mitigation, management, and adaptation strategies. She has made significant contributions to the analysis of the recent severe flood events in Germany, including to the analysis of warnings in July 2021 and the long-term consequences of floods on health.
After her degree in geoecology at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Annegret Thieken completed a doctoral degree in environmental geology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In 2011, she was appointed Professor of Geography and Natural Hazards Research at the University of Potsdam.
Prof. Manfred Strecker, Senior Professor at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Potsdam, is one of this year's honorees of the Argentine government's LELOIR Prize. Through the presentation of this award, the Argentine Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is honoring Manfred Strecker's many years of research and teaching activities in Argentina as well as his efforts to build academic research networks between Germany and Argentina.
In addition to the numerous research projects, Strecker and his colleagues are involved in the binational training of doctoral students at the German Research Foundation (DFG), the International PhD research group StRATEGy and in the dual doctoral program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which the geologist supervises in conjunction with Professor Bodo Bookhagen at the University of Potsdam. Over the past seven years alone, a total of 26 dissertations, numerous postdoctoral projects, and over 30 visiting scholars have been supervised in both projects.
Through the Premio LELOIR, named after the Argentine biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Luís Leloir, Argentina has since 2010 been honoring international researchers who have contributed to bolstering the country's scientific and technological capacities as well as to the internationalization of its science and research landscape.
