Katharina Pistor has taught and researched as a law professor at Columbia University Law School since 2001 where she is now the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law. After graduating from the University of Freiburg in 1988, she went on to postgraduate studies in London and Harvard and received her doctorate at the University Munich. She has held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard); and was a guest professor at the Institute for Law and Finance (Frankfurt), the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Katharina Pistor is a member of the Center of Economic Policy Research and the European Corporate Governance Institute (currently on the Board of Directors). Her consulting activities for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development highlight the policy relevance of her work.

Katharina Pistor is a leading international expert in the field of comparative corporate law, financial market regulation and institutional economics. She conducted groundbreaking and outstanding research work on legal and financial market developments in emerging markets and transition countries. The award honours, in particular, her research at the intersection of law and economics. The decision to honour Katharina Pistor was also taken in recognition and in the expectation of her continued commitment to building bridges between European and American legal culture.

The award committee described Martin Hellwig as one of the most influential German economists of his generation. He has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn since 2004. Previously, he worked at the Universities of Stanford, Princeton, Bonn, Basel, Harvard and Mannheim. He graduated in Economics from the University of Heidelberg in 1970 and received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. Martin Hellwig receives the award for his work on the economic effects of banking regulation, in particular on the role of aggregate risks, the macroeconomic repercussions of banking regulation and on systemic feedback effects in the financial sector.

Already in the 1990s, Martin Hellwig made several fundamental contributions to our understanding of these issues. Since 2008, he has used the insights he has gained for further important work on the causes of the recent financial crisis, on the reform of banking regulation and on bank resolution. His work has had a major influence on academic and political discourse on the financial crisis and regulatory reform. Martin Hellwig has also been active in the field of political consultancy. From 1998 to 2006, he served on the German Monopolies Commission, including a spell as Chairman (2000–2004). Currently, he is Chairman of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board.

Sebastian Thrun teaches and conducts research at Stanford University. Since 2004 he has headed the Stanford Institute for Artificial Intelligence, one of the world’s largest and most important institutes in this field. The 43-year-old information scientist works at the interface between artificial intelligence and robotics. His main interest is robotic systems which are able to learn and move independently.

One of his achievements has been to show that it is possible to use a mobile robot to create a map of the surroundings without the availability of prior knowledge and to estimate the robot’s position and orientation in the process effectively. His work also opens up new fields of application for robots beyond industrial mass production. In 1997 he developed the “Rhino” robot, which was able to provide a guided tour through the Deutsches Museum Bonn autonomously. The successor, “Minerva”, was tested in 1998 at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Other robot models can chart mines or use speech to communicate with humans. Sebastian Thrun has therefore achieved findings of extreme scientific importance concerning the ability of mobile systems to orientate themselves.

Bernhard Schölkopf is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. The 43-year-old mathematician and physicist is also one of the founding Directors of the newly-established Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart and Tübingen. He is one of Europe’s leading researchers in the field of machine learning. He researches computational methods, so-called algorithms, which can be used to program computers to react flexibly to new situations.

Bernhard Schölkopf’s research results have made the algorithms for machine learning more efficient. Statistical estimation problems can thus be generalized to such a degree that they can be used on biological-medical issues, as well as problems relevant to the social sciences and philosophy.

Timothy Bromage has been a professor at the New York University College of Dentistry since 2004. His work includes a study in Malawi in southeast Africa aimed at deciphering details of the living conditions of early man from the structure of teeth and bones. An examination of anatomical finds at the micro-level, something which very few researchers have so far attempted, has proven to be particularly revealing.

Bromage hopes to resolve some difficult questions such as whether bones and teeth belong to a male or female individual, and whether, during their lifetime, there were one or two rainy seasons per year. In the course of his work he has discovered a new mechanism by which to determine the speed of growth and life history of the individual from the laminar structure of their bones. The award will support Bromage in making the examination of bones and teeth an even more important tool in the study of human evolution. He is currently creating a database with which to compare the metabolism and bone structure of present-day apes and humans. His scientific work has earned him awards from among others the National Science Foundation (2009, 2007), the National Geographic Society (2008) and the National Institute of Health.

Psychologist Michael Tomasello, who was born in Bartow, Florida, is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig where he heads the department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology. Working on the frontier between natural sciences and the human sciences, his primary interest lies in the origins of language and the cultural evolution of mankind.

In numerous empirical studies of small children and primates, Tomasello is investigating the cognitive abilities that distinguish man from other highly-developed primates and which have enabled us to create a long-lasting culture. He is convinced that one key element is man’s ability to see things from the perspective of his fellows and imitate their behavior and associated intentions. The awards received by Tomasello in recognition of his scientific work include the Fyssen Foundation Award for Cognitive Sciences (2004), the Jean Nicod Prize for Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences (2006), the Oswald Külpe Prize of the University of Würzburg (2009) and the Hegel Prize presented by the City of Stuttgart (2009). As a scientific host active in the Humboldt Foundation network, he has worked with several Humboldt research fellows, as well as with Sofja Kovalevskaja Award winner Brian Hare.

Description only in German

Description only in German

Since 2003, Prof. Dr. Peter Fratzl has been Director of the Department of Biomaterials at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and is one of the pioneers in the field of biological and biomimetic materials. The biophysicist strives to understand what makes bones and wood so stable and at the same time deformable. His innovative, experimental work in the area of physics and his multiple award-winning interdisciplinary research has earned Fratzl a position as one of the most respected representatives of biomimetic materials research. Recently, the scientist discovered how wild wheat is distributed by the motor and control mechanism of the awns. His prize money will be put towards the further research of mechanical attributes of biological and biomimetic materials as well as to highlight the importance of biomimetic materials in the scientific field.

Since 2005, Prof. Dr. Robert Langer has been an Institute Professor for chemical engineering and medical technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (MIT), USA. Langer’s scientific work concentrates mainly on the study of the transfer of biological functions to materials. A major focus of his research in this area is his work on controlled release systems for drugs. Langer’s special area includes so-called "Tissue Engineering", in which biomimetic materials play an important role for the development of drugs. Langer’s prize money will be put towards supporting the use of biologically composed materials in biotechnological and biomedical research.

Prof. Raymond Joseph Dolan, Ph.D. was born in Ireland in 1954. He has been working at University College London since 1996 where he has held the Mary-Kinross chair for neuropsychiatry since 2001. His research is as manifold as the soul, which is presumably located in the brain, according to modern science: Dolan is interested in human emotions, as well as in emotional memory and the influences that feelings have on decision making processes. He has revolutionized neurobehavioral research by researching the “anatomy of emotions” via imaging techniques.

Prof. Hans-Christian Pape, Ph.D. (*1956) has been conducting research at the Institute for Physiology I, University of Münster since 2004. After his studies in Biology in Bochum and a research residency in the USA, he headed the Institute for Physiology at the University of Magdeburg from 1994 to 2004. Pape has outlined the fundamentals of how wakefulness and sleep are controlled, and conducted research into fear memory, for which he has received many honors, including the distinguished Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1999. He is also well known for his skills as a teacher: In 2006 he was chosen "teacher of the year” by students in Münster.

My subject is imagery, not art,” wrote Horst Bredekamp in his thesis in 1974. “Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution” [Conflict in images from the Late Antiquity to the Hussite Revolution]. Bredekamp has been researching the power of images for 30 years. Following the “Iconic Turn”, he appealed for universal analytical competence to be applied to the history of art. When the “death of Art History” was already being widely discussed, he imbued the discipline with new self-confidence.

In his view, even the field of film and media analysis which had been dominated by linguists was a fitting area for historical Bildwissenschaft. After all, the subject had developed a finely tuned set of tools over the last two hundred years to allow critical consideration of the circumstances surrounding images and their meaning.

Bredekamp’s work is astonishingly diverse. He is an expert in Renaissance and Mannerism, with knowledge ranging from medieval sculpture to network art. His publications, which appear at short intervals, include inspirational essays on issues in cultural history that link art and technology, the natural sciences, philosophy and politics. His medium is not thick coffee table art history books but concise companions for intellectual adventurers. He decodes Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting “La Primavera /Spring” in exactly the same way as the choreography of the Florentine form of football, calcio - as a political statement by the Medici; patronage of the arts and enthusiasm for football were simply two sides of the same coin.

Whether he sees a premonition of the philosophy of state in the engravings for Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” or identifies the constitutive prototype for the theory of evolution in Charles Darwin’s rough sketch of a coral, as a multidisciplinarian Bredekamp always aims to understand the image not just as an illustration, but also as a depository of philosophical and scientific thinking. At the well-attended “Theatrum naturae et artis” exhibition presented in the Martin Gropius Building in 2001, he and Johannes Brüning traced the various collections held by the Humboldt University to the Kunstkammer in the Berlin palace, which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would have liked to develop into a palace of the senses and enjoyable science. The accompanying study, “Die Fenster der Monade. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst” (2004) again emphasizes the central role ascribed to associative vision in modern philosophy.

Increasingly, Bredekamp is turning his attention to the significance of images in the natural sciences. The more abstract the area of research, the more important the image, which becomes a key component of the research; nanotechnology is an example here. Although contrived, the images appear generally as “authentic” illustrations of a reality that has never been seen. In the search for a comprehensive explanation of the culture of visual knowledge, Bredekamp, together with mathematicians and mediaevists, media specialists and computer experts, proponents of cultural studies and philosophers founded the interdisciplinary Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technology at the Humboldt University.

This also forms the foundation of the futuristic project in which for the first time technical images from the 16th century onwards are being collected, ordered and analyzed. The digital image atlas, not unlike the utopian atlas of the imagination which Leibnitz planned, now contains over 2000 objects. The whole project is initially set to run for eight years and is to include real models from chemistry and physics, and clocks as world models. The analysis of bioimages promises to be just as exciting as the exploration of architectural software or computer games.

Is ornamentation a crime? Adolf Loos’ purism manifesto of 1908 was a signal. Ornament was eschewed by the architects of the Modern Age and also by the architecture historians of the early 20th century. The architecture of the Renaissance appeared to the researchers the result of a purely mathematical harmony. As a result, the key role that decoration occupies in the theory and practice of architecture in the Renaissance was long overlooked. Significantly, the architect Alina A. Payne embarked on the study of art history at the end of the 1980s when Postmodernism had reached its zenith. Ornamentation and pillars were in fashion again, with the conclusion drawn by some that “It is not possible to ignore history”.

Payne wanted to get to the bottom of history. Inspired by her professor at the University of Toronto, the highly regarded Alberti expert Hans-Karl Lücke, she started by subjecting the texts with which all architecture theory starts to close scrutiny: the first was “Ten Books on Architecture” by Vitruv (approx. 30 BC). This is the only work on art theory in the Ancient World to have survived and was considered a sacrosanct set of rules from the Renaissance to the 17th century, whereby its puzzling terminology invited not only criticism, but also invention. This was compounded by the way that fragments of ancient architecture revealed by archeologists rarely corresponded to the writings. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, complained about Vitruv’s confusing formulations and decided to develop his own theory, the first of the modern age (in 1452, printed in 1485).

”Close reading” is the name Payne gives to her method of subjecting the famous and also the overlooked architectural treatises of the Renaissance from Alberti to Vicenzo Scamozzi (1615) to a subtle revision. The tools available for the study of literature and a highly developed sensitivity to the Latin and Italian languages have allowed Payne to discover some astonishing facts. The authors of the treatises - philosophers, artists and archeologists - adopted the issues and argumentation of rhetoric and poetry, the defining culture of the time. For example, Sebastiano Serlio (1537) used the terminology of rhetoric to describe ornamentation on buildings. He also introduced the rhetorical concept of licentia, artistic freedom, into architectural theory. With the concept of imitatio from poetry, architecture was able to define itself as a mimetic art. Indeed, whether a façade is good depends in the final analysis on fiction. As words should be used to enhance rhetoric, so too should the arrangement of pillars, architraves and friezes - ornaments - be used in the architecture in question - that is, "appropriately". This allowed room for innovation, particularly where ornament was concerned.

With the same care with which she reread the architectural treatises, Payne subjected the standard works of the Renaissance to a critical appraisal. In her prize winning essay on Rudolf Wittkower, whose “Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism” (1949) is still one of the most quoted works on art history; she was able to show how much his perception was marked by the aesthetics of the modern age. Payne’s literary studies enrich the tradition of German-American architectural history with surprising perspectives. Her goal is to return the history and theory of architecture, marginalized in art history since the modern age, to the centre stage. Payne’s research seems to focus on a history of the artistic aesthetic of architecture in modern times. The role of ornamentation, long the subject of disapproval, will remain a key issue: essence or accessory – that is the question. In this respect, Payne is increasingly concerned with the architectural debates of modern age.

Approx. 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was born in the big bang explosion that created time and space. But how did the first structures in the universe come into existence – stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, planets, and among them, our own planet? One who is trying to provide answers to such questions is radio astronomer Christopher Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

His observation device is one of the largest in the world, his working place, located on the plains of Socorro in New Mexico, USA, one of the most beautiful. The Very Large Array (VLA) is a group of 27 radio telescopes, each measuring 80 m in diameter, probing for signals that might unlock the mysteries of human existence. In contrast to other telescopes, these are mobile along railroad tracks and their location can be varied. Combined, the VLA has the resolving power and sensitivity of one theoretical super telescope which is not achievable under current technology. Synchronising the individual telescopes and consolidating the relevant data requires the utmost technical precision as well as a high degree of scientific creativity. Combining both these characteristics, Christopher Carilli continues to push back the frontiers of observation. His research interests as a radio astronomer cover a broad spectrum of subjects such as radio galaxies, quasi-stellar objects, and galaxy clusters.

The remarkable degree of creativity that he brings to his scientific work, together with his profound technical understanding, has made Carilli one of today’s leading radio astronomers. For example, he developed one of the few methods to assess the redshifts of radio objects. He also promotes the development of the next generation of radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). With these telescopes, astronomers hope to collect data which will provide answers to fundamental cosmological questions. Carilli intends to use the Max Planck award to support junior scientists, especially in the studies of cosmic re-ionisation; i.e. the period in which stars were formed and the first structures of the universe came into being.

Where the large meets the small, key questions of cosmology might just be about to be answered. While astronomers survey the depths of the universe with ever larger telescopes, particle physicists search for the smallest building blocks of matter with the help of huge and powerful accelerators. One such scientist, particle physicist and theoretical physicist Christof Wetterich, is trying to unlock one of the biggest secrets of the universe: dark matter.

So far, this exotic cosmic substance, believed to permeate all of the universe, has eluded all laboratory tests and detectors. Although invisible, its presence is detected through its gravitational effects, most notably the acceleration of cosmic expansion for the past five billion years. But what is behind this mysterious dark energy? Only once we manage to shed light on its nature will we be able to make predictions about the ultimate fate of the universe.

Christof Wetterich was the first to suggest the existence of a dynamic dark energy, later termed “quintessence”. The quintessence hypothesis provided one of the most logical and also most popular explanations for the expansion of the universe. Since then, one of the focal points of Wetterich’s research has been a question that has always occupied physicists: the possible distinction between dynamic quintessence and static dark matter.

Wetterich has assumed a leading position in the theoretical and phenomenological debates of this intriguing cosmological question. No doubt, he will play an even more prominent role in the future. The Max Planck Research Award 2005 enables Wetterich to set up a working group for the interpretation and consolidation of the most diverse astronomical observations and the assessment of various cosmological models so that a more complex understanding of dark energy can be expected in the near future. Without any doubt, dark matter is a major challenge for particle physics and astrophysics.

The complete map of the human genome, which comprises three billion components, is a milestone of modern science. A significant contribution to this work came from Eugene "Gene" W. Myers, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the pioneers of computational molecular biology.

As head of the bioinformatics department at Celera Genomics, he developed methods for stringing together the small segments (clones) of DNA that are generated during the sequencing process. It was Myers who recognized that the problem of locating gene segments in the right order (assembly) could be solved by first selecting the clones according to their length. Using simulations, he was able to resolve the sequence overlaps for the entire human genome using only clones of defined length. This proved to be the key to the assembly of the complete genome.

Bioinformatics, or computational molecular biology, combines many different disciplines, such as molecular biology, statistics, computer science and genetics. Martin Vingron, Professor of Computational Molecular Biology and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, is one of the leading experts in this field.

His main research interests center around gene expression - the transformation of genetic information into gene products - and the regulation of gene activity. Many diseases, or even disease stages, can be characterized by the specific pattern of activity ("gene expression profile") exhibited by the approximately 30,000 genes of the human organism. In the near future, physicians will have tools like DNA microarrays, or "gene chips", enabling them to scan their patients' DNA for tiny mutations of individual genomes. The results will permit the design of precisely focused therapies individually tailored to each patient. Martin Vingron's scientific work has provided an essential basis for this development.