“Take the stage” at the Young Researchers Symposium: science brought to the point clearly and simply

At the beginning of August, doctoral students from Kaiserslautern and Landau used the Young Researchers Symposium (YRS) as a platform to train their presentation skills this year for the sixth time. The task: to present their own research to a non-specialist audience - in an exciting and generally understandable way. The best contributions were awarded prizes with a total value of 6,000 euros.

Every two years, the TU-Nachwuchsring at RPTU and the High-Performance Center for Simulation and Software-based Innovation organize the Young Researchers Symposium - an interdisciplinary symposium at which Kaiserslautern and Landau doctoral students from a wide range of research fields have the opportunity to inspire a non-specialist audience for their research topic in a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. In this way, the YRS trains a skill that will be useful sooner or later in the course of an academic career: Communicating one's own research in an understandable way.

This year, 41 doctoral students from RPTU, the Fraunhofer Institutes ITWM and IESE, DFKI, IVW and, for the first time, Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences presented their research in an impressive way. The topics ranged from autonomous driving to research into neurodegenerative diseases, the extraction of raw materials from wastewater and the sustainability of museums. The best contributions in the categories of posters, talks and abstracts were awarded prizes with a total value of €6,000. The aim was not only to convince the Scientific Committee, which was primarily made up of young researchers, but also the audience.

The most convincing presentations were delivered by Cora Laumeyer (1st place; Best Talk) and Florian Altes (1st place; Best Poster) with presentations on the extraction of biodegradable plastic from brewery wastewater and the development of fluorescence sensors for the identification of zinc in living cells. Prizes were also awarded to the contributions of Nesrin Dilmen (2nd place, Best Talk) with a lecture on biologically inspired copper catalysts, Arvid Kraus (2nd place, Best Poster), who reported on mixing processes in the process industry, Stephanie Rommel (3rd place, Best Talk) with a lecture on the early detection of Parkinson's disease and Maximilian Eckrich (3rd place, Best Poster), who explained topology optimization using the example of the "Teufelstisch".

The prize for the best abstract was shared by Corinna Schittenhelm and the duo Aiswarya Nair and Alex Keilmann, who were awarded equal points by the reviewers.

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Quelle: Translation of the press release from RPTU University Communications (original article in German)