Umbrella Award for Stefanie Elgeti
Professor Stefanie Elgeti was honored by the Umbrella Collaboration between RWTH, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
The Umbrella Collaboration between RWTH, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was established in 1983. The strategic partnership is considered a major driver of high-impact cross-border research. This year’s Umbrella Symposium saw the first presentation of the newly created Umbrella Award, worth 5,000 Euros. From now on, it will be awarded annually to outstanding scientists in the symposium’s respective key research topic.
This year, the symposium took place in Haifa, Israel, and focused on the topic of “Energy Conversion and Energy Storage.” RWTH's first award recipient is Professor Stefanie Elgeti from the Chair of Computational Analysis of Technical Systems, CATS. At the symposium, she presented a novel approach to the solution of problems in the area of fluid-structure interaction, which can occur at wind turbines, for instance.
The other award recipients are Emre Durmus from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Professor Matthew Suss from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The prize money, which is provided by Deutsche Technion Gesellschaft e.V. (de), is used to support the award recipients during their time as visiting lecturers and researchers in Israel and in Germany.
Support of Early-Career Researchers
With the award, the three institutions seek to support excellent early-career researchers. “The Umbrella Award is unique at the national level, and through the support from the Deutsche Technion Gesellschaft, it is of international relevance as well. The award comes with a grant to enhance collaboration and support the exchange of researchers between Germany and Israel. The aim is to make the award recipient more internationally mobile and provide them with a competitive edge,” explains Professor Joachim Mayer, head of the RWTH Institute of Microstructural Analysis and the University’s academic coordinator of the Umbrella Collaboration.
The Award Recipient
The first RWTH Umbrella Award recipient, Stefanie Elgeti, has been a simulations technology researcher for over ten years. She came to RWTH to study mechanical engineering and stayed in Aachen after graduation. In 2014, she received the Young Researchers Award from the Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries Cluster of Excellence. Recently, the mother of two daughters, aged 11 and 14, also has been contributing to the renewal applications in the nationwide “Excellence Strategy” competition.
Her current research area is simulation and numerical design in the field of primary shaping processes. "From a mathematical point of view, I am concerned with inverse problems, which are to be described with the help of a suitable parameterization and a quality function. “Together with my working group, I have worked on applications in the areas of plastic profile extrusion, plastic injection molding, and aluminum diecast,” says Stefanie Elgeti. Her working group seeks to model all process steps from filling through solidification and the determination of deformation and residual stresses.
Strategic Perspectives
Next year, the symposium is scheduled to take place in Jülich; in 2020, it will be held at RWTH. The Technion in Haifa is the oldest university in Israel. Among its 610 faculty members, there are three Novel laureates. As Professor Mayer explains, “as the leading university of technology in Israel and an incubator for an impressive number of technology spin-off companies, the Technion offers invaluable potential for RWTH to further develop its profile and its strategic perspectives. The exchange between the partners, which are all considered to be excellent research institutions, has turned out to be highly stimulating and fruitful, both at the academic and at the personal level.”
International Research Exchange
In December 2018, there will be a Summer School for doctoral candidates of the three partner institutions in Israel. One of the key objectives of the Umbrella Consortium is to foster international mobility of early career researchers. As Joachim Mayer explains, “To this end, in addition to the Umbrella Award, we have established the Umbrella Winter and Summer Schools for doctoral candidates and early-stage postdocs, where experts from the partner institutions cover a wide range of topics in current research. It provides our young researchers to get to know each other and establish contacts with experienced researchers from all three institutions.”
The Schools take up the key topics of the annual symposia, so that the participating researchers have the chance to stay in touch with their peers by attending the symposia as well.
Photo
From left: Professors Wayne Kaplan, Vice President for Research, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology; Joachim Mayer, coordinator of the Umbrella Collaboration; and Sebastian Schmidt, member of the Board of Forschungszentrum Jülich, presented Professor Stefanie Elgeti with the Umbrella Award.
Source: Press and Communications