Best PhD Poster Award at 30th anniversary of H-BRS

1st Prize: Alina Gehrke 

Health or wealth? The influence of gendered demands, resources and work-family interferences on success in entrepreneurs

In her doctoral thesis, Alina Gehrke analyses gender-specific differences in the context of company start-ups:

Women are still underrepresented in the start-up scene and research to date has been predominantly orientated towards male experiences. As a result, specific challenges faced by female entrepreneurs, such as the higher level of care work or the stress of coordinating private and professional life, are often overlooked. Health-related factors also go largely unnoticed despite their relevance to entrepreneurial success.

The doctoral project investigates how female entrepreneurs can be successful in the long term while maintaining their health. It analyses which personal characteristics are linked to success and how their significance changes over time. It also investigates how professional and private demands influence objective results and the subjective assessment of success.

2nd Prize: Elias Ellingen

Beam Shaping of VCSEL-Arrays with Collimating Random Microlens Arrays

Elias Ellingen is working on the optimal illumination of 3D cameras with their own lighting system:

The aim of the doctoral project is to develop compact, efficient optics that specifically adapt the emitted light to the requirements of the respective system - for example by specifically illuminating certain areas or projecting patterns for distance measurement. Various beam shaping methods are being investigated, including microstructured lenses and computer-generated holograms. The strengths and weaknesses of the approaches are analysed using simulations, prototypes and experiments. Another focus is on dynamic beam shapers that flexibly adapt patterns to the respective measurement task.

The aim is to develop customised lighting solutions with more powerful 3D measurement systems, e.g. for robotics and industrial quality assurance.

3rd Prize: Alexandra Mielke

Closing the gap: An Annotated Synthetic Large-Scale 3D Dataset with Low-Cost Time-of-Flight Data and High-Quality Ground Truth

Alexandra Mielke wants to use her PhD project to advance facial recognition with 3D cameras:

Despite its higher security, 3D facial recognition is rarely used for authentication. One reason for this is that the acquisition of high-quality 3D data is often too expensive.

In order to enable 3D facial authentication at European border controls, for example, this doctoral project is looking at whether 3D facial authentication is generally possible with time-of-flight cameras, what data quality these cameras need to achieve in order to perform 3D facial authentication and how the data quality can be increased.