For outstanding achievements in his field of work, the President of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Professor Holger Hanselka, is granted the August Wöhler Medal. The medal was handed over at the annual conference of the DVM Working Group on Structural Durability in Ingolstadt. Special emphasis in the decision process on granting the award is placed on the practical use of the results in the industrial context.
According to the Association, Hanselka, who was Director of the Fraunhofer Institute of Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF in Darmstadt from 2001 to 2013 and today is the President of the KIT, made an outstanding contribution to structural durability through his own scientific work and the research projects headed by him. He considerably extended the scopes of the discipline and initiated new interdisciplinary cooperative ventures. The DVM underlines that Hanselka successfully established innovative topics of relevance to the future.
“Knowledge and technology transfer are highly important to me. I am therefore very happy to receive this honor of the DVM that supports exchange between research and industry,” Hanselka said.
Holger Hanselka was born in 1961 and studied mechanical engineering at the Clausthal Technical University. In 1988, he took up work as a scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and specialized in the fields of lightweight construction and fiber composites. After a professorship at the Otto-von-Guericke Universität of Magdeburg, Hanselka was appointed Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF and Head of Institute for System Reliability and Machine Acoustics of the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2001. From 2006 to 2012, Hanselka was Member of the Presidential Council of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. From 2010 to fall 2013, he was Vice-President of TU Darmstadt. In October 2013, Holger Hanselka was elected President of KIT.
Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 10,000 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,800 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.