We welcome Professor Peter Fineran from the University of Otago as a member of our association: he was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers earlier this year. Peter’s Fellowship is held at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research in Würzburg.

Markus Friedrich, Professor of European History at Hamburg University, has received a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation to come to Otago in February and March 2020. During his visit to Otago, Professor Friedrich will work on a monograph on early modern European genealogical practices and give a series of public lectures entitled “Genealogy between religious experience and social practice”.

On 28 November 2019, Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond from the University of Auckland delivered the final of the series of ten  Kosmos Lectures to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt.  Professor Salmond, who received a Humboldt Research Award in 2018, gave her lecture titled Kosmos: Entangled Worlds at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin.  Congratulations to Anne on this distinction. For details of her many other awards and honours, see here.

We are delighted to report that in November 2019  Professor Bakh Khoussainov from the School of Computer Science at the University of Auckland received a Humboldt Research Award to conduct research at a number of German universities, including Siegen and RWTH Aachen. Bakh is the first computer scientist in New Zealand to receive this award. His research interests include Logic, Computability, Automatic Structures, and Theoretical Computer Science. Details of his many distinctions can be found here.