Otto Junker Awards for Excellence Presented to Three RWTH Graduates in 2023
Lina Fischer, Alba Clemente Sanchez, and Kathrina Theisen received the 2023 Otto Junker Prize for their outstanding academic achievements. The Otto Junker Award is conferred annually to RWTH students from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Materials Science and Engineering Division of the Faculty of Georesources and Materials Engineering.
Supporting Early-Career Researchers
The Otto Junker Foundation was founded in 1970 by Dr.-Ing. h.c. Otto Junker. As an alumnus of RWTH, he felt intimately connected to the University throughout his life and particularly valued the ongoing intellectual dialogue. The foundation aims to support young researchers as well as numerous individual projects. Udo vom Berg, Chairman of the Otto Junker Foundation, and RWTH Rector Ulrich Rüdiger presented the awards at a ceremony. Professor emeritus Wolfgang Bleck, Chairman of the Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board, congratulated the award winners.
After graduating from school, Lina Fischer enrolled in RWTH’s bachelor’s degree program in Industrial Engineering and Management with specialization in Electrical Power Engineering. She completed her master’s degree at the Chair of Transmission Grids and Energy Economics, writing her final thesis on “The Impact of Flexible Consumers on Market Pricing in a Renewable Electricity Supply System” under the supervision of Professor Albert Moser. Fischer has been working on her doctorate at the RWTH Institute for High Voltage Equipment and Grids, Digitalization and Energy Economics since the beginning of 2023.
Alba Clemente Sanchez studied Materials Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Subsequently she completed the English-taught master’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering at RWTH. Her master’s thesis, titled “Virtual Experimentation to Develop a Digital Twin for the Optimization and Online Control of Continuous Steel Casting Process”, was supervised by Professor Ulrich Krupp from the Institute of Ferrous Metallurgy and Dipl.-Ing. Erik Hepp from MAGMA Gießereitechnologie GmbH. Sanchez currently works as a quality engineer in Switzerland.
Kathrina Theisen was born in Lahnstein. After graduating from school, she studied materials engineering and completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees here at RWTH. Her master’s thesis on “Design Investigations for Glass Tank Simulation” was supervised by Professor Herbert Pfeifer, head of the Department for Industrial Furnaces and Heat Engineering. She has been a research assistant at the Institute since October 2022 and is conducting research on a hydrogen-fired glass melting furnace which is to enable the CO2-neutral production of container glass.