Almost three months have passed since the official opening of the CRC on September 15th/16th 2016. In the meantime many people have asked us if we could publish the inauguration speech given by the spokesperson of the CRC, Prof. Dr. Marlis Hochbruck. We are happy to fulfill this request as a peculiarity on St. Nicholas Day. Here is the speech.
Welcome everybody. My name is Marlis Hochbruck. I am a professor of numerical analysis at KIT since March 2010 and currently I am the spokesperson of the CRC “Wave phenomena: analysis and numerics”, which is funded by the DFG since July 2015.
Marlis Hochbruck – Spokesperson of the CRC
The summer school has now ended. My thanks go to the participants and lecturers. It was one of the first activities where our CRC invited participants from outside and we thank all of you, participants as well as lecturers, for your interest and your active scientific input.
Thanks also go to the organizing team of the summer school, most notably to Roland Schnaubelt and his team consisting of Tobias Lamm, Katharina Schratz, and Jens Rottmann-Matthes, to our CRC coordinator Christian Knieling and our CRC secretary Sonja Becker. I would also like to thank everybody who just helped us with little assists in various ways. Without your support it would not have been such a smooth event.
Today’s dinner and tomorrow’s scientific talks mark the official inauguration of the CRC – although it is already one year old. This is like the christening of a new-born baby – it is done at a certain positive time after its birth.
Let me now say a few words on how the birth of the CRC baby was initiated.
The first ideas to start this endeavor date back to October 2010, when we had a workshop on “Wave Phenomena” in Freudenstadt and created a large number of questions: how to find PIs, topics, partner institutions, partners, etc. We could not answer these questions directly, so we formed the so-called “wave team”. This team first learned some basics on project management and how to organize itself, and then came up with a series of four preparation workshops starting in October 2011. At the end of this series of workshops, we were ready and motivated to work on projects and we had also identified our partners from other KIT departments and as well as two from the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart.
By the end of 2012, we had very nice ideas on individual projects but the question was how to glue them together into a CRC (where the first “C” stands for “collaborative”). Hence the wave team spent the year 2013 organizing 8 internal workshops on specific topics in order to find links between projects, start new collaborations, and set-up an internal evaluation process.
Since CRCs should not only be a collection of scientific projects, but additionally should have structural impact on the host university, we also had to address these issues seriously. On the scientific level, we invited several guests to KIT and we successfully applied for joint Oberwolfach workshops between Analysis and Numerics. On the executive level, we convinced the presidential board of KIT and the Department of Mathematics to finance two Juniorprofessorships including funding for two doctoral students.
In autumn 2013, the proposed CRC had found its shape and the final writing of the preproposal started.
Note that the DFG decides on funding a CRC in a two-stage process. First you must submit a preproposal (100 pages plus profiles of PIs). This is evaluated by international reviewers who give a recommendation to the senate of the DFG. This senate meets twice a year and finally gives a recommendation to submit a full proposal or not. It is only a recommendation but in fact, this is the harder part with a much smaller success rate than the decision in the second stage.
Our trusted partners (with Alexander Ostermann and Serge Nicaise, two of them are here today) helped to improve the preproposal which we finally submitted in December 2013. The evaluation of this preproposal took place in March 2014 in Zurich. The six professors traveling to Zurich felt like going into a very big final exam. As usual after an exam, you have a feeling about your grade. Our feeling was quite good but there was also some criticism and so it was not clear to us if we were above the threshold for a positive recommendation of the DFG senate. We had to wait two long months for the decision of the DFG senate. You can imagine how relieved and happy we were when we got the positive recommendation to submit a full proposal.
Let me tell you also that even before the submission of the full proposal there was yet another big hurdle to jump, namely the presentation of the preproposal to the KIT committee entitled “CRYS: Council for Research and Promotion of Young Scientists”, an experience the wave team will never forget. It was truly a tough situation full of questions and suggestions from colleagues from other departments, but we also had a lot of fun when discussing it retrospectively in a nearby bar at the end of that remarkable evening.
The positive outcome of the first stage motivated us enormously. We felt like soccer players: we were given a free penalty kick and we really wanted to convert it. Hence 2014 was devoted to the preparation of the full proposal, taking the comments of the reviewers into account very seriously. It was a great exercise in team building to keep everybody motivated for such a long time. Finally we managed to submit the proposal directly after the Christmas break in January 2015, more than three years after the workshop series and more than four years after the first ideas and the formation of the wave team.
“After submission” meant “before on-site evaluation”, which was scheduled in March 2015 here in Karlsruhe. For all of us, in particular for the wave team, it was a very intensive time. We only survived because all of us did sports or music to clear our heads. The evaluation went very well but another long two months passed until the final funding decision arrived and we could celebrate a spontaneous party in May 2015 here in the Atrium.
As a little anecdote, let me tell you that one of the reviewers asked us to join him for a run after the end of the evaluation. For obvious reasons one has to try to fulfill all wishes of reviewers if possible, so two of us went running with him in the Hardtwald for an hour, although this guy has a marathon personal best close to 3 hours.
Our achievement would not have been possible without the participating scientists, which are of utmost importance for the success of the CRC: the PI’s who take the responsibility for the research, the PostDocs and the PhD students, and last but not least our partners all around the world. Those are the people who make waves great again.
Today’s conference dinner is also a good opportunity to say how proud we are of our students. From the very beginning, they were involved in discussions and ideas leading to a concept for the promotion of young scientists which really impressed the reviewers. This got us financial support for an integrated research training group. One of the activities just happened this week, namely our first summer school; a second one will be organized 2018. The students and PostDocs also did a great job during the review. They helped the PIs to prepare posters, they were highly motivated and competent discussion partners for the reviewers and thus contributed significantly to the positive funding decision.
Sincere thanks go to my colleagues of the wave team, most notably Wolfgang Reichel, with whom I share the role of a spokesperson. I could not think of a better partner to do this. We both would not have been able to bring this CRC to KIT without our team mates Tobias Jahnke, Andreas Rieder, Roland Schnaubelt, Christian Wieners. Thanks also to our coordinator Christian Knieling and our secretary Sonja Becker. Their work, their patience, and their motivation ensures, that the scientific work can be done. Without them it would not have been possible to hire more than 30 people within a few months, to administer traveling of about 80 participating scientists, numerous guests, the web page, our blog, and to collect information required for KIT, DFG, etc.
We also received great support from the Department of Mathematics that enabled us to hire some very talented students even before the decision about funding was made by the DFG. This fact – as explained above – was essential for the positive evaluation.
We are very grateful for the support we received from KIT (most notably from the former and current heads of Division V Prof. Dr. Saile and Prof. Dr. Blümer, the former Vice President for Research Prof. Dr. Löhe, and the entire presidential committee): they created the structural environment and financial support that helped us so much to set up our proposal. For instance, they made it possible to appoint two junior professors within record time.
It is thus a great pleasure for us that our new Vice President for Research, Prof. Dr. Oliver Kraft, accepted our invitation to join us this evening and to say a few words. Oliver Kraft has been working as a professor and head of today’s Institute for Applied Materials at KIT since 2002. In 2011, he was granted the Professorship for Nanostructured Functional Materials funded by the Bosch Group. From 2012 to 2015, he was one of the spokespersons of the Helmholtz Programme Science and Technology of Nanosystems (STN). On January 2016, Oliver Kraft became Vice President for Research at KIT.
After Prof. Kraft’s welcome speech, you are invited to the dessert buffet. As a last remark, let me say that this is just the opening event of the CRC, so there is a lot more to come, hopefully not only for the next three years but for the next eleven years. For instance, our next planned events are:
Women in PDEs (spring 2017)
Conference on waves (2018)
Summer school (2018)
You are invited not only to attend but also to share this information. Thank you very much for your attention and please welcome Vice President Prof. Oliver Kraft.