Three female and seven male researchers to receive Germany’s most important prize for researchers in early career phases / Prize money of €200,000 each / Award ceremony to be held on 11 June in Berlin

This year, three female and seven male researchers are to receive the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize – Germany’s most prestigious award for researchers in the early stages of their academic career. This was decided by the Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in Bonn. Each prizewinner will receive €200,000, which they can use for further research work for over a period of up to three years. A total of 156 researchers from all scientific disciplines were nominated. The winners were selected by the committee responsible chaired by DFG Vice President and biochemist Professor Dr. Peter H. Seeberger. The award ceremony will be held on 11 June in Berlin.

The Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prizes 2026 go to: 

• Professor Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, Mobile and Wireless Security, Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, Potsdam

• Dr. Guillem Domènech Fuertes, Gravitation and Cosmology, University of Hannover 

• Professor Dr. Michael Hahn, Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken

• Professor Dr. Benjamin Loy, Romance Literature, LMU Munich

• Dr. Isabel Mira Oldengott, Particle Physics and Cosmology, University of Bielefeld

• Dr. Kami Alexander Pekayvaz, Cardiology and Angiology, LMU Munich 

• Junior Professor Dr. Alex Plajer, Polymer Chemistry, University of Bayreuth

• Junior Professor Dr. Dominik Schmid, Stochastics, University of Augsburg

• Junior Professor Dr. Julia Schulte-Cloos, Political Science, University of Marburg

• Dr. Luke Dimitrios Spieker, Constitutional and European Law, HU Berlin 

Since 1977, the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize has been awarded annually to outstanding researchers who are at an early stage in their academic career. The prize aims to support and encourage recipients, who do not yet hold a permanent professorship, as they continue to pursue their research paths. They receive the award not only in recognition of their doctoral dissertation but in particular because they have already developed an independent research profile and are contributing valuable research to their field, thereby giving rise to the expectation of further academic excellence in the future.

Since 1980, the prize is named after nuclear physicist and former DFG President Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, during whose term of office (1974-1979) it was first awarded.

The prizewinners in detail:

Professor Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, Mobile and Wireless Security, Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, Potsdam

Whether posting memes on a smartphone on the train, jogging with a smartwatch in the woods or streaming films on a tablet at home on the sofa: we are surrounded by mobile and wireless devices and they have become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. Yet the ubiquity and complexity of these systems entail numerous risks. In particular, previously unknown challenges arise in the areas of security and data protection due to opaque systems and manufacturer-driven developments. Through the systematic use of various scientific methods, such as “fuzzing” and reverse engineering, Jiska Classen gains access to manufacturers’ closed (proprietary) systems and applies innovative approaches to uncover previously unknown security vulnerabilities in mobile and wireless systems. Her findings and the methods she has developed make a lasting contribution to international security research and are of enormous societal relevance in our interconnected world.

Dr. Guillem Domènech Fuertes, Gravitation and Cosmology, University of Hannover 

Guillem Domènech Fuertes’ work focuses on the interplay between gravitational waves and primordial black holes in the early phase of the universe. Inflation theory posits that shortly after the Big Bang there was a brief phase of extremely rapid expansion of the universe, which may have generated a stochastic background of gravitational waves. While gravitational waves from the merger of black holes or neutron stars were measured for the first time in 2015, this gravitational wave background has not yet been detected. Among other things, Guillem Domènech Fuertes has shown that gravitational waves generated in secondary processes during the inflationary phase can produce a strong signal that is measurable in principle and can interact with primordial black holes. His work has proved valuable in gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying physical processes, and it is now used in interpreting current measurements of the gravitational wave background using pulsars, for example. 

Professor Dr. Michael Hahn, Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken

Even the most advanced AI language models (large language models, LLMs) can perform poorly on logical tasks. Calculations may be incorrect, sequences misrepresented, and the AI may hallucinate and generate incorrect figures or citations. Michael Hahn’s work at the interface of machine learning and computational linguistics explains why LLMs continue to make errors despite significant advances. He has initiated a line of research that analyses the capabilities of the neural network architecture on which all popular LLMs are based – the transformer architecture. As a result, he is able to demonstrate mathematically that transformers fail on tasks in which every part of the input is relevant to the output, i.e. where changing a single character can alter the correct result. This yields theoretical insights that make it possible to better predict the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. 

Professor Dr. Benjamin Loy, Romance Literature, LMU Munich

Globalisation has affected literature, too: novels circulate as commodities around the world within the asymmetrical structures of the global book market, while a global readership engages with literary innovation and unfamiliar narrative worlds. Since his doctoral thesis, Benjamin Loy has conducted pioneering research not only on the national literatures of France and Spain but also on texts of the “new” world literature from Latin America, thereby expanding the traditional boundaries of his field. Loy’s work consistently focuses on aesthetic features in the context of intellectual, social and cultural history. For example, to what extent do narrative strategies from the Global South follow the (Western) notion that globally received literature might contribute to the cultivation of a cosmopolitan outlook? This becomes apparent not only in the work of the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño: the narrative worlds and transcultural systems of reference of authors from the Global South challenge Western conceptions of literature, the world and progress. They create aesthetics that highlight the consequences of colonialism and violence, for example, and offer alternative concepts to supposedly universal Western notions of time. 

Dr. Isabel Mira Oldengott, Particle Physics and Cosmology, University of Bielefeld

At the interface between cosmology and particle physics, Isabel Mira Oldengott established an international reputation early in her career through her contributions to the study of the properties of neutrinos. She was the first to correctly describe the cosmological effects of hypothetical neutrino self-interactions using methods from statistical kinetic theory. In subsequent work, she also examined the implications of possible neutrino decays and interactions with other particles. Her work has made it possible to draw conclusions about the properties of neutrinos – often referred to as “ghost particles” – from observations of the structure of the universe. Further outstanding contributions by Isabel Mira Oldengott address the dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. Using state-of-the-art methods, she has succeeded in establishing a link between phase transitions in the strong interaction and asymmetries between particles and antiparticles. This may influence future observations of gravitational waves from a very early epoch of the universe.

Dr. Kami Alexander Pekayvaz, Cardiology and Angiology, LMU Munich

Atherosclerosis and thrombi in the coronary vessels can have various causes, including inflammatory processes and the relevant immune responses. The cells involved in such processes can be analysed in detail. This is where the translational research pursued by clinician scientist Kami Alexander Pekayvaz begins. Based on multi-omics analyses of the blood of cardiac patients, he has shown that the circulating immune system can interact with the heart, also in the context of myocardial infarction, and that the two systems influence each other. Biomarkers in the blood point to systems-level biological mechanisms at the single-cell level and can be linked to pathological processes in the vessel walls. By the same token, Pekayvaz tested both in vitro and in animal studies whether the individual cellular changes are indeed relevant to disease. These findings could in future enable personalised therapeutic options and the prediction of disease progression. He previously also demonstrated that stress mediators can alter individual immune cells and blood coagulation, which can lead to thrombus formation but also to thrombus dissolution, depending on the conditions. 

Junior Professor Dr. Alex Plajer, Polymer Chemistry, University of Bayreuth

Plastics are chemically robust. They degrade very slowly and are difficult to recycle. In the environment, they pose a threat to a wide range of organisms and ecosystems. Alex Plajer works on sustainable yet versatile polymers whose inorganic components can be more easily separated and, ideally, recycled. He and his research team have already succeeded in producing a new class of fluorinated polyesters that are more easily degradable than conventional polyesters. Plajer has also developed designs for entirely novel sustainable plastics containing sulphur. These involve dynamic disulphide bonds that function as a kind of molecular breaking point. The sulphur–sulphur bonds can be opened and closed under pressure and heat, thereby facilitating the recycling of thermosets. By innovatively integrating inorganic synthesis into macromolecular chemistry, Plajer has laid the foundations for a new subdiscipline of polymer science.

Junior Professor Dr. Dominik Schmid, Stochastics, University of Augsburg

For transport phenomena in a wide range of scientific fields and everyday applications – including road traffic and the spread of disease – mathematics offers a unified language for modelling based on processes of exclusion. The individual moving “particles” (e.g. cars in road traffic) move randomly, while certain configurations must be excluded (for example, two cars cannot occupy the same position). In recent years, research has focused on the question of how long it takes for a system of moving particles to reach equilibrium. In mathematics this is referred to as mixing times, and when equilibrium is reached abruptly, it is known as a “cutoff”. Verifying the latter is a very challenging research problem. Dominik Schmid has significantly advanced the field through the development of conceptually new methods. His approaches have the potential to become standard tools that are largely independent of specific system properties and therefore widely applicable. He also develops new techniques and methods in other areas of modern probability theory by combining ideas from different branches of mathematics.

Junior Professor Dr. Julia Schulte-Cloos, Political Science, University of Marburg

Digitalisation has opened up entirely new possibilities in the social sciences for generating empirical insights and research findings, with citizens leaving digital traces every day on social media and other online platforms. Julia Schulte-Cloos draws on this data for her political science research. In innovative study designs, she combines different datasets and analyses them using AI to address key questions of our time. What are the consequences of voters’ political dissatisfaction in terms of democratic decision-making processes? To what extent do political crises contribute to the rise of anti-democratic actors and movements? What types of identity shape voting behaviour in modern societies? Her research into populism and far-right parties in Europe makes a key contribution to understanding the determinants of support for such parties and the consequences of their growing success for political participation.

Dr. Luke Dimitrios Spieker, Constitutional and European Law, HU Berlin 

When the national-conservative PiS government in Poland curtailed the judiciary, the Court of Justice of the European Union responded in 2015 with a series of harsh rulings, interim measures and the imposition of record penalty payments. On several occasions, Europe’s highest court found that Poland’s judicial reforms, in particular the disciplining of judges, were in violation of EU law. But is the European catalogue of rights sufficient to enable European jurisprudence to enforce European values such as judicial independence? Luke Dimitrios Spieker addressed this question in his doctoral thesis – and it has since become a standard reference work. Drawing on a considerable methodological breadth in this and other work, Spieker develops a coherent conception of European law. He also works on topics such as LGBTQ* rights in Europe. His current research project on the interplay between nationality law and European integration addresses a field of high legal and political relevance. Within a very short time, he has acquired outstanding expertise in fundamental questions of European law, making him a sought-after advisor to public institutions such as the Federal Foreign Office and the Conference of European Affairs Ministers of the German Federal States. 

Further Information

The award ceremony for the 2026 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prizes will take place at 4 pm on 11 June in the Alte Turnhalle in Berlin. Representatives of the media will receive further details prior to the event.

Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize(interner Link)

Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize Recipients(interner Link)