Anna Balazs received her B.A. Physics degree from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She subsequently studied materials science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where she also obtained her Ph.D. She has been Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh since 1987. Her work focuses on the investigation of polymer-based materials and the computer modeling of these materials.

She is a world-renowned computational scientist specializing in polymer composites, a class of hybrid materials that combine polymers with other building blocks. Her exceptional creativity, combined with her visionary approach, has made her a pioneering figure in the field. She is among the rare theorists who not only conceive innovative materials concepts from scratch, but also develop computational methods to test and refine these ideas. Her predictions often lead to groundbreaking collaborations with experimentalists, resulting in paradigm-shifting discoveries. This includes diverse areas of materials science, for instance, nanocomposites, self-healing materials, oscillating gels, polymeric microcapsules, and actively induced flows.

Professor Johannes Kabatek from the University of Zurich (UZH) is Professor of Romance Philology, with a special focus on Ibero-Romance linguistics. In 2020, he became the Director of UZH’s Competence Center Language & Medicine. Johannes Kabatek is one of the most renowned Romance linguists in the German-speaking world and beyond. His remarkable academic achievements include ten monographs and 24 edited books as well as more than 140 academic papers and about 200 lectures given. Over the years, Kabatek has also made an outstanding contribution to the promotion of early-career researchers. About one in every three of the 25 scholars who completed their doctoral and professorial dissertations under his supervision now hold professorships in countries such as Germany, Austria, Spain, Brazil, and Switzerland.

Johannes Kabatek was born in Stuttgart in 1965. He studied, amongst other subjects, Romance Philology and Political Science at the University of Tübingen. He obtained his doctorate in 1995 with a thesis on language contact in Northwest Spain, which has since become a standard reference at international level. Professor Kabatek’s habilitation thesis similarly goes beyond the limits of linguistics. It is a key piece of scholarly work for Europe’s legal, intellectual, and cultural history, in which Kabatek manages to bridge the divide between different academic disciplines in a unique and impressive way.

Paola Arlotta is Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. She is rewarded for her pioneering discoveries regarding brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders as well as her innovative approaches towards brain repair. She studied biochemistry at the University of Trieste and was awarded a Ph.D. in molecular biology by the University of Portsmouth before she relocated to Harvard University. There she focused her research on the development of the cerebral cortex and succeeded in refuting the long-held view that neuronal identity remains irrevocably fixed in the brain and has thus helped opening up a completely new field of research. In the recent past, Arlotta was able to generate organoids of the cerebral cortex from human stem cells. This has formed the basis for modelling the development of the human cerebral cortex and has resulted in the discovery of core mechanisms underlying developmental disorders of the nervous system.

Rainer Blatt is a professor at the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck. Here he heads one of the world’s leading research groups in the field of trapped ion quantum computing that creates simulation algorithms for use in research on solid-state physics, molecular physics, and high energy physics. Blatt is among the world’s most prominent researchers in his field and he enjoys an outstanding reputation. He has made a major contribution to quantum optics by means of his pioneering experiments.

Blatt was born in Idar-Oberstein in 1952 and studied and obtained his doctorate at JGU. He subsequently entered the world of research, collaborating in the USA with the eventual Nobel Prize winner John Lewis Hall. He holds numerous scientific prizes, including the Stern-Gerlach Medal, which is the most distinguished award given by the German Physical Society (DPG), the John Stewart Bell Prize of the University of Toronto, and the Micius Quantum Prize of China.

Wil Roebroeks is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Leiden University. His research focus is on Neanderthals and other (earlier) Eurasian hominins. Among other things, he investigates how these primeval humans used fire, managed to subsist, produced stone tools, and even changed the environment around them. For this he employs data that he has collected during extensive excavations in countries such as the Netherlands, France, Russia, Germany, and the UK.

Wil Roebroeks is one of the world’s leading researchers in his field. Through his work, he has been able to provide fundamental insights into the earliest human settlement of Europe and Asia. Moreover, he is actively involved in promoting the research community in any number of ways. From 2011 to 2021, Roebroeks was Vice-President of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE) and a member of the advisory boards of various specialist journals and research institutions, including the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (RGZM) in Mainz and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). He holds a number of honors, including the Spinoza Prize – the most distinguished academic award of the Netherlands – and the Humboldt Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that is given to outstanding international researchers.

Corine Defrance has been undertaking research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) since 1995. She has also been lecturing at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Sirice, since 2003. The history of Germany in the 20th and 21st centuries, Franco-German relations during this period, and European unification after the Second World War are at the focus of her research. She has made exceptional contributions in particular with regard to the reappraisal of the history of Franco-German relations and has produced a large number of publications on the subject. Some of these publications are now seen as standard works on the development of the relation between the two countries after the Second World War.

Corine Defrance’s connections to Mainz reach back to the time she was writing her dissertation, in which she analyzed the fundamentals of French cultural policy in occupied Germany from 1945 to 1955 and in this context the reestablishment of Mainz University. She also dedicated later research to the history of Mainz University, using sources in the local university archive for this purpose and collaborating with researchers at JGU.

Adela Yarbro Collins is Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation Emerita at Yale University. John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation and works also at Yale. Both have made and are still making enormously important contributions to scholarship on the history and literature of the Second Temple Period (from approximately 520 before the common era to the year 70 of the common era), Early Judaism, and Early Christianity. Their oeuvre includes a vast number of monographs, articles in leading scholarly journals, editorial activities, and involvement in international conferences and meetings. In addition to their expertise in biblical literature, they are excellent and leading scholars in the areas of the history of religion, Jewish Studies, and Christian origins.

An important topic that both are continuously working on involves the ideas and literature of “apocalypticism.” The motifs and thoughts of this large movement in Early Judaism and Early Christianity are still vibrant today. While John Collins tends to focus upon the earlier period, including the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and Early Jewish literature, Adela Yarbro Collins pursues this phenomenon in the era of Early Christianity, that is the period of the New Testament and related apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature.

In the early seventies, John Collins formulated a definition of “apocalypse” and “apocalypticism” that became a standard in the entire field of biblical studies. His seminal work, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” reached now its third edition. The scholarly community regards this book and John’s commentary in the Hermeneia series on the “apocalypse” of the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Daniel, meanwhile as classics. John Collins is also well known for his important studies and publications on the non-biblical literature found at Qumran. He is, however, not only one of the premiere specialists on apocalyptic and Qumran literature but also an excellent teacher. His general “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” is now available in a second edition. As an acknowledgement for his outstanding performance, his scholarship and teaching, John Collins received an honorary degree from University College Dublin in 2009 and from the University of Zurich in 2015. Recently, he has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Adela Yarbro Collins received a “Doctor theologiae honoris causae” from the University of Oslo in 1994 and an “Ehrendoktor” from the University of Zurich in 2015. Her first book, “The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation,” was very influential within New Testament scholarship and the study of the history of Early Christianity, as it revived the history of religions approach to this apocalyptic work. Subsequently, Adela Yarbro Collins fostered innovative research on the book of Revelation in “Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse” by introducing social psychology to the study of this text and bringing this approach to bear on the interpretation of a somewhat strange but nevertheless fascinating writing of Early Christianity. Her commentary on the Gospel of Mark is another very important work, published in the leading series of American biblical commentaries, Hermeneia. In addition to the commentary, she contributed many publications to the research on the Gospel of Mark in general.

Karin Knorr Cetina is Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Chicago. Her academic biography shows us a true cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary researcher. After her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna and a post-doctoral diploma in sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, she worked at several American universities, before coming to the University of Bielefeld where she acted as professor of sociology for almost twenty years. In 2001, she moved to the University of Konstanz and since 2010, she has been acting as distinguished professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Knorr Cetina is known, among other things, for her innovative studies of the working methods and practical rationality employed by natural scientists and foreign exchange traders. In 1981, Karin Knorr Cetina has published the pioneering monograph “The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science.” She used ethnographic and anthropological methods to analyze the scientific practices within a laboratory in order to understand how natural scientists produce facts and knowledge in their everyday work. This groundbreaking study marked the breakthrough of a whole new field of research called “social studies of science.” She inspired generations of students and their empirical studies of the social construction of scientific knowledge. In 1999, she published “Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge.” By thoroughly investigating and comparing scientific practices in high-energy physics and in molecular biology, she highlighted the importance of knowledge cultures in the generation of scientific knowledge.

In the 1990s, Karin Knorr Cetina started her research on another highly influential form of knowledge and analyzed how financial markets create economic knowledge. She and her team accompanied market participants at work, mainly traders on foreign exchange markets, and analyzed the interaction between trading transactions, the economic knowledge of the dealers and the visual presentations of the virtual market on the screen. Knorr Cetina published the results of her studies in several widely received articles. Soon her new book “Maverick Markets: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets” will sum up many results of her research on financial markets in the last decades.

Karin Knorr Cetina has produced many new insights on science and financial markets as two of the most influential fields of modern societies. Recently, she has published several articles and is preparing a book where she intends to draw a theoretical synthesis from her seminal empirical studies. She analyzes modern society as a “synthetic society” that may be characterized by the coupling of human action with technical artefacts and virtual systems.

Vishva Dixit grew up in Kenya and received his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Nairobi before continuing his research at the Washington University School of Medicine and later the University of Michigan Medical School where he became Professor at the Department of Pathology. In 1997, he left university to continue his research as Director of the Department of Molecular Oncology at the biotechnology company Genentech. Today he holds the position as Vice President for Early Discovery Research at Genentech and Director of their Postdoctoral Program.

Dixit is famous for several path-breaking contributions to biomedical research, many of which are decorating the textbooks already. He is best-known for his research that laid the foundation on programmed cell death and inflammation. Apoptosis as one form of programmed cell death was still a mysterious process in the early 1990s, and the mechanisms driving this fundamentally important cellular process were completely unclear. Dr. Dixit and his lab identified the components of this cell death pathway and defined the mechanisms driving this fundamental cellular process. Furthermore, Dixit made seminal contributions to the study of inflammation and immunity by defining the components of inflammasome. He was able to explain how the bacterial signals are recognized by the host immune system. More recently, Dixit’s lab deciphered how “ubiquitination”, one of the most versatile modes of protein modification contributes to tumorigenesis, inflammation, autoimmunity and diabetes.

Vishva Dixit has been a pioneer and a distinguished and much acclaimed scholar in the biomedical field for several decades and his works have dramatically altered our understanding of the molecular events required for programmed cell death and inflammation. In addition to his contributions to progress in fundamental research in immunology, biochemistry molecular biology and other fields, his works have already paved a way for developing novel therapeutics in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune disorders.

Kazunori Kataoka

Professor Kazunori Kataoka is one of the world’s leading polymer chemists, having developed specific polymers for biomedical applications. His nano-transporters are remarkable as they are based on long-chain molecules, i.e., polymers, which are used for the targeted delivery of anticancer drugs to tumors and for the transport of genetic material in gene therapy. He is a pioneer of a new concept in which the drug is enclosed in micelles. These are aggregates of specially developed polymers. It is possible to specifically guide these nano-transporters to affected tissues or organs. For this purpose, they need to circulate in the blood for a relatively long time so that they eventually accumulate in tumor tissue. Several differently designed polymer micelles that Kataoka has developed for cancer therapy are currently in clinical trials in various countries, including the UK and France. Some of these polymer agents are close to actual application. This would confirm the ultimate breakthrough of this concept.

Professor Kazunori Kataoka has pursued his scientific career mainly in Tokyo, and he has received worldwide recognition and held several guest professorships at European universities. He is Professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at the University of Tokyo and member of numerous scientific societies in Japan and the USA. He has received the highly prestigious Humboldt Research Award for research in collaboration with members of the Mainz-based Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1066 on “Nanodimensional polymer therapeutics for tumor therapy” and also the NIMS Award of the Japanese National Institute of Materials Science.

There are several areas in which Kataoka’s work coincides with the research being conducted in Mainz with its long tradition of experimentation with self-organizing nano-structures based on polymers. Polymer-based medications and nano-transporters based on polymers are regarded as a core area of current polymer research. Corresponding strategies are not only being developed at JGU, but also at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research as part of the CRC 1066, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Crucial to the success of this research is the close cooperation with medical groups at the Mainz University Medical Center within the CRC. The first joint projects with the Kataoka work group have already started and include both exchange of PhD students and joint publications.

Kwok Pui Lan

Professor Kwok Pui Lan is William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work represents a paradigm shift in the historiography of Christian mission. Instead of looking at the spread of Christianity as a movement promoted by the “white man” she includes the history of local Christianities in her research. Kwok has also set new standards in interreligious hermeneutics by demonstrating that in Asia the Bible can only be read in the context of the holy scriptures of other religions. Based on her interdisciplinary approach that integrates feminist and post-colonial theories, Kwok is also highly regarded outside theological circles.

Kwok Pui Lan, born in 1952 in the then British colony of Hong Kong, received her education first at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and at the South East Asia Graduate School of Theology. She was awarded a ThD by Harvard University and holds honorary doctorates from universities in the Netherlands and Sweden. The wide recognition she enjoys was shown in her election as President of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in 2011, the largest and most influential professional organization for religious studies and theology. Professor Kwok Pui Lan has won several awards for her academic work and for her teaching activities, including the prestigious American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Teaching.

By bestowing on her the Gutenberg Research Award, the GRC is honoring an outstanding representative of post-colonial feminist theology, sending a clear signal to German academic theology to be more open to intercultural issues. The university is thus also linking an internationally recognized Christian intellectual to Mainz, one who prominently speaks out in public debate. This results in far-reaching options for cooperation in the field of intercultural theology as it is represented by the Department of Comparative Religion and Missiology at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at JGU. Cooperation is already bearing fruit in the form of the promotion of young research talents and the development of intercultural teaching strategies.

Ernst Fehr

Ernst Fehr has been Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economics at the University of Zürich since 1994. He is presently chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, where he also serves as director of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society. He has been a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University since 2011 and was an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2003 to 2011. Despite many offers from internationally leading universities, such as Berkeley, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and New York University, he stayed in Zürich and transformed this place into one of the leading places for interdisciplinary approaches to economics in the world.

Fehr is clearly one of the best-known and most highly cited economists of the world. He is a pioneer in the interdisciplinary approach to economics who was among the first to cross disciplinary boundaries. His research extends far into the realms of psychology, sociology, biology, medicine and neuroscience. He has numerous top publications in economics. But his interdisciplinary breadth and excellence are particularly evident in the fact that he has published a total of 18 articles in Nature and Science. He also regularly publishes in top psychological and neuroscientific journals, such as Psychological Science or Neuron.

Fehr has conducted extensive research on the impact of social preferences on competition, cooperation and on the psychological foundations of incentives. He has shown that fundamental economic and social questions, such as the functioning of markets and organizations or the design of contracts, institutions, and incentives cannot be answered without a deeper understanding of the behavior of individuals and economic actors. Fehr’s research focus is in the areas of social science and economics, but he successfully goes a step further and examines the biological, hormonal, genetic, and neuronal foundations of human behavior. In particular, he was able to demonstrate the importance of no longer viewing people as “Homo Oeconomicus”, i.e. as rational and egoistic people whose only motivation lies in maximizing profits.

Michèle Lamont

Michèle Lamont is a professor of sociology, European studies and African and American studies at Harvard University. There, she currently also serves as Acting Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In addition to her position at Harvard, she is a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a regular guest at renowned international research institutions, such as the EHESS in Paris, Tel Aviv University, Sciences Po Paris and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).

Michèle Lamont has published more than eighty papers, most of them in internationally acclaimed journals. Several of them were translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and German. Furthermore, she has edited twelve anthologies and has authored three influential, award-winning books that have also been translated into different languages.

Lamont is a bridging personality, being widely acknowledged in sociology, political sciences, cultural anthropology, and science studies. In this respect, her culturally comparative inequality studies are mainly related to a concept in whose theoretical development she was significantly involved: Symbolic boundaries and boundary-making stand for practices of distinction and processes of negotiating cultural hierarchies. She developed this concept in a highly original fusion of European and American social sciences and furthermore as an ‘ethnologist’ through the socio-scientific construction of socio-scientific elites.

Even beyond the boundaries of academic research, Michèle Lamont’s expertise is well-respected and sought after. Among others, she was a member of the French government’s Haut Conseil de la science et de la technologie as well as in the scientific advisory council of Sciences Po. She also works as a consultant for the World Bank and UNESCO.

Last but not least, Michèle Lamont is actively engaged in the education and advancement of young academics. She refined the institutional support services at Harvard University where she set up a mentoring program for tenure holders. Her extraordinary commitment has so far been acknowledged on two occasions: She was awarded a “Master Mentor” by Harvard University and received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.

The GRC honors the achievements of Maciej Lewenstein – one of the leading researchers in the field of quantum physics and beyond, as his work has been highly influential in different branches of physics and other sciences. After graduating from Warsaw University in 1978 he joined the Centre for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In 1983, he finished his PhD in Essen and his habilitation in Warsaw in 1986. In 1995 he joined the faculty of the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique in Saclay, and in 1998 he became full professor at the University of Hannover. In 2005 he moved to Spain as ICREA – the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies – Research Professor to lead the quantum optics theory group at the Institute of Photonic Sciences.

In the scientific community, he is best-known for his contributions to high-order harmonics generation when matter is exposed to extreme laser field strengths. His articles on Bose-Einstein condensates, or degenerate ultra-cold fermionic atoms are read and cited widely. His proposals in quantum computing are nowadays realized experimentally.

Although his research already encompasses a wide range of issues in quantum physics and the neighboring sciences, he still paves direction to new research fields where he contributes with his expertise and creativity. For instance, he has developed novel ideas for quantum simulation and its application both in the description of entanglement and many-body systems, relevant for condensed matter physics, and also for hard problems in high energy physics. His book on quantum phase transitions became quickly a reference in this field.

Leonard Talmy, Professor emeritus of Linguistics at the State University of New York in Buffalo, is best known as one of the founding fathers of Cognitive Linguistics. Talmy’s understanding of Cognitive Linguistics is rooted in the conviction that language as a cognitive system shares some of its fundamental design features with other cognitive systems (e.g., the human visual system), but also exhibits characteristics and organizational principles genuine to language alone. Thus, language structures can neither be directly derived from general cognition nor is language to be seen as a completely autonomous model of human cognitive architecture. Talmy’s integrative and encompassive “Overlapping Systems Model of Cognitive Organization,” an independent stance within Cognitive Linguistics may well explain why Leonard Talmy’s work has been received and widely appreciated not only by linguists outside the paradigm, but also by developmental psychologists, applied linguists and foreign language teaching experts, and even philosophers. Among his best known and outstanding accomplishments at the interface of language and cognition are seminal studies on motion typology, cross-linguistic representations of space concepts, lexicalization patterns in the languages of the world, an evolutionary model of compositionality in language that is very much compatible with current neuroscientific binding models of neural synchrony. Beyond the core area of cognitive semantics, Leonard Talmy has published influential articles on the culture system and on narrative structure that testify to his rigorously interdisciplinary stance.

His commitment to JGU, especially to its Department of English and Linguistics, has become visible for quite a few years now. From 2008 on, he has, apart from maintaining profound and long-lasting personal relations to individual members of the Department, been an external reviewer in a Habilitation, a guest lecturer in 2009, a consultant to one of the individual component projects in the large-scale research project on “Determinants of Linguistic Variation”.