Female Student Travel Award 2024

Students receive award and travel grant for academic achievements

2024/07/04 by

This year's Female Student Travel Awards from CROSSING go to Bachelor's students Greys Fankyeyeva and Carina Schulte. They receive the award for their noteable academic achievements in computer science. In addition, the two prize winners not only have a strong interest in, but also early involvement with the topics of the Collaborative Research Centre CROSSING. The prizes were awarded on Wednesday (3 July) as part of the Ruzena Bajcsy Lecture on Communications and Resilience of the Collaborative Research Centre MAKI.

Greys Fankyeyeva has been working as a student assistant in the System Security Lab of CROSSING-PI Prof. Ahmad Sadeghi with a focus on hardware security since the summer semester 2022. There she actively supports the organisation of the annual High-Tech Women Workshop as well as other events in the field. In her free time, Ms Fankyeyeva is involved in voluntary work. The determined Ukrainian is currently writing her bachelor's thesis and is aiming for a doctorate after completing her master's degree in IT security. Her travel award will lead her to the Ada Lovelace Festival in Ludwigsburg this November.

Carina Schulte will complete her Bachelor's degree this summer. She is writing her thesis in Professor Mariami Gachechiladze's Quantum Computing Group. In addition to her thesis topic of secure quantum communication, Ms Schulte is particularly interested in IT didactics. Building on this, she was already involved as a tutor for digital technology and human-computer interaction as well as a lecturer for the Student Academy of the Hasso Plattner Institute during her bachelor's degree. She will use the travel stipend to attend the ditact Summer Studies in Salzburg in late summer.

In addition to Greys Fankyeyeva and Carina Schulte, seven other female students were honoured with the Female Student Travel Award. Professor Florian Steinke presented the award to Annika Gabrian and Isabel Schwalm on behalf of the LOEWE centre emergenCITY. Michelle Huang accepted the prize from the Research Training Group Privacy and Trust from Dr Ephraim Zimmer. Iris Kunz and Maryam Rahmani were honoured by Dr Andrea Ortiz on behalf of the Collaborative Research Centre MAKI. The Zuse School ELIZA joined as a new award-sponsoring organisation this year. Dr Sebastian Harrach presented the award on behalf of the graduate school to Anna-Maria Kugler and Marina Sakharova, the first award winners from the field of AI.

About the award

The Female Student Travel Award rewards outstanding academic achievement by female students in subjects related to the participating collaborative research projects. It covers travel costs to a conference focussed on bringing together female researchers in the fields of computer science and engineering to take advantage of the excellent networking opportunities at these events. The selection process is supported by TU Darmstadt's Gender Equality Office.

Learn more about CROSSING's outreach activities