Elias Ehrlich was appointed Junior Professor (tenure track, pay scale group W1) for Quantitative Conservation Biology at the Faculty of Sciences.

He studied “Ecology, Evolution and Nature Conservation” at the University of Potsdam, where he subsequently completed his doctorate in the field of ecosystem modeling on food web dynamics and coexistence mechanisms. During his postdoctoral period, he initially conducted research at the Center for Ocean Life in Denmark and later at the University of Potsdam on how aquatic species communities adapt to environmental changes. He was awarded the Schwoerbel-Benndorf Prize for Young Scientists by the German Society for Limnology for his research. Prior to his appointment, he worked at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, where he was in charge of a participatory management process in the transdisciplinary project ”Boddenhecht” and worked as a modeler.

In his research, he combines modeling, field data analysis, and transdisciplinary methods to investigate mechanisms for biodiversity conservation and approaches for the sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems.

Oliver Bodensiek was appointed Professor of Information Technology in a Vocational Education Context (pay scale group W3) at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences.

After studying physics and completing his doctorate at the University of Göttingen with research stays at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Oliver Bodensiek worked in research and the industry sector. From 2016 to 2021, he held the junior professorship for “Didactics of Physics and Teacher Education” at TU Braunschweig, where he was involved in fundraising and as a project lead in all three funding phases of the “Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung” (quality offensive for teacher training). He then went on to head up further and advanced training in the field of quantum technologies at the Federal Institute “Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt”.

His research focus is at the intersection of science and technology education and human-computer interaction (e.g. cognitive processes in immersive learning and working environments) as well as the professionalization of teachers in the context of digital transformation.

RudolfZeidler was appointed Professor of Geometry (pay scale group W3) at the Faculty of Sciences.

Zeidler studied mathematics at the University of Vienna and completed his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 2016. He then worked as a postdoc at the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Münster, interrupted by a temporary professorship as a substitute at the Georg August University Göttingen in the summer semester of 2020. He completed the habilitation process in 2022, also in Münster. In 2023, he received an ERC Starting Grant for his research agenda and was accepted into the Heisenberg Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG), which allowed him to continue his research in Münster as a temporary professor (W2) before moving on to Potsdam.

His research focuses on scalar curvature. This is a concept of curvature from Riemannian geometry that describes subtle geometric phenomena in higher-dimensional spaces and is related to the mathematical description of the general theory of relativity. The main goals of his research in the coming years is to develop new tools for studying scalar curvature. To this end, he combines methods from geometric analysis, differential geometry, and algebraic topology.