Two DAAD-Alumni are today receiving the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG). DAAD President Prof. Dr Joybrato Mukherjee congratulates the two award winners. In total, the DFG awards ten outstanding researchers with prize money of 2.5 million euros each. 

"I warmly congratulate Marietta Auer and Karen Radner on receiving Germany's most important research award. As a scientific exchange organisation, we are proud that we were able to support their careers with stays abroad at an early stage," says DAAD President Prof. Dr Joybrato Mukherjee. 

Prof. Dr. Marietta Auer works at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory, Frankfurt/Main and is a professor at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen. She receives the award for outstanding work in the field of legal theory and legal history. From 1999 to 2000, she was a DAAD scholarship holder at Harvard Law School in the USA. Even after her return to Germany, the legal scholar remained connected to the Law School: in 2012, she earned her doctorate in law there.

Prof. Dr Karen Radner teaches Ancient Oriental Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She receives the award for her internationally influential research and discoveries, especially on the Assyrian Empire in the first millennium B.C. The Austrian was a DAAD scholarship holder for archaeology at the Free University of Berlin and a volunteer at the Museum of the Ancient Near East in Berlin from 1993 to 1994.