The German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded the 2018 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize to Antonia Wachter-Zeh of Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Prof. Antonia Wachter-Zeh is one of ten young scientists to receive the most important German award for young talent. (image: Astrid Eckert / TUM)

TUM scientist wins the most important German award for young talent

MUNICH, 30-Mar-2018 — /EuropaWire/ — The German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded the 2018 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize to Antonia Wachter-Zeh, Professor of Coding for Communications and Data Storage. Wachter-Zeh has been conducting research and teaching at Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2016. Her research on new algorithms combines engineering sciences, informatics and mathematics.

Prof. Wachter-Zeh’s research focuses on errors, more exactly on errors that occur during data transmission and on new methods and algorithms for avoiding and correcting such errors. These errors can occur constantly in everyday life, for example when saving files to flash drives or using digital wireless communication networks to make phone calls. Antonia Wachter-Zeh’s algorithms make sure that information is protected from unauthorized access by means of encryption and is nevertheless stored correctly. These algorithms can be applied not only to classical storage media, but also to experimental methods such as storage of information in DNA.

Wachter-Zeh has been a professor at the TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2016. She received her position, a “Rudolf Mößbauer Professorship”, as part of the TUM Faculty Tenure Track program. The TUM Mößbauer professorships are not offered for specifically defined fields of research. Instead, interested academics can apply based on their own research profiles. Prof. Wachter-Zeh’s activities are supported in part by the DFG’s Emmy-Noether program. She is also a fellow of the TU Munich Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS).

The Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize will be presented to Antonia Wachter-Zeh and nine other young researchers in Berlin on May 29, 2018. The award is endowed with € 20,000 and has been awarded since 1977. It is considered the most important award for young scientific talent in Germany. It is named after the atomic physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, former President of the German Research Foundation and one of TUM’s most prominent scientists. He developed among other things the scientific-technical concept for the first German neutron source, the FRM research reactor in Garching.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

CONTACT:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Antonia Wachter-Zeh
Technical University of Munich
Institute for Communications Engineering
Tel: +49 (89) 289 – 23495
antonia.wachter-zeh@tum.de

SOURCE: Technical University of Munich (TUM)

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