Renowned biologist receives the Tübingen Prize for Science Communication
The biologist Professor Rita Triebskorn receives the Tübingen Prize for Science Communication 2023. The jury thus recognized her many years of commitment to communicating her research results to the general public. The AI researcher Auguste Schulz is awarded the Young Talent Prize for Science Communication.
“Rita Triebskorn has worked continuously and persistently over the past ten years to create awareness for her central research topic, the ecological protection of water bodies from pollutants and microplastics,” explained the jury in its statement. Triebskorn’s work shows in an impressive way that the public can understand the central importance of science in order to understand the fundamental and at the same time vital connections in our environment and to make them visible. In addition, this mediation activity actively contributes to the protection of an important habitat for countless animals and plants.
The jury was particularly impressed by the sustainability and consistency with which Triebskorn committed itself to the public and by the breadth of its communicative activities. This included public lectures, political advice and media interviews, the children’s university, but also her cooperation with the Science Media Center as an important mediation platform for science communication.
Rita Triebskorn studied biology and German studies at the University of Heidelberg to teach at secondary schools, where she received her doctorate in zoology in 1990. She then worked as a scientist for the Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical company Lonza and at the University of Hohenheim. Since 1995 she has been working at the University of Tübingen in the teaching and research area of physiological ecology of animals, where she deals with topics in applied environmental protection. She habilitated in zoology in 1999 and was appointed associate professor in 2006. At the same time, she has headed the Steinbeis Transfer Center for Ecotoxicology and Ecophysiology in Rottenburg since 2000.
The young researcher Auguste Schulz is honored for her activities in teaching artificial intelligence and machine learning. This included, among other things, setting up a local group in Tübingen for the nationwide initiative “KI macht Schule”, whose target group are middle and high school students. Schulze designed and organized visits by AI researchers to schools as well as school trips to the AI campus of the University of Tübingen.
In this context, the jury particularly emphasized the young researcher’s commitment to children from families without an academic background: “Teaching schoolchildren basic knowledge about artificial intelligence and technologies based on it such as ChatGPT or Dall-E2 is of great importance for our society. The mastery of such tools as well as the knowledge of their possibilities and limitations will be a factor in the future that will essentially determine the social participation of each individual.”
Auguste Schulz studied physics in Heidelberg and London and then neuroengineering in Munich. Since autumn 2020 she has been working as a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen in the working group of Jakob Macke, Professor for Machine Learning in Science. The young scientist is doing her doctorate at the interface between neuroscience and machine learning. As part of her doctoral thesis, she is developing statistical methods that make it possible to understand how the activity of neurons in the brain is related to behavior, such as complex movement sequences.