On 26 June 2026, the Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics bid farewell to its graduates at a formal graduation ceremony held in the Audimax at Paderborn University. Together with their families, friends and numerous guests, they celebrated the successful completion of their studies.
The event opened with a musical performance by the band ‘Weekender’. Dean of Studies Prof. Dr.-Ing. Katrin Temmen then welcomed the graduates and the numerous guests. In her address, she paid tribute to the graduates’ dedication and achievements and thanked everyone who had supported them throughout their studies.
Prof. Dr René Fahr, Vice-President for Transfer and Sustainability at Paderborn University, delivered the welcome address on behalf of the University Executive Board. The keynote speech was then given by Prof. Dr Peter Schreier, CEO of metamorphosis GmbH. Under the title ‘The Case for Being Human in the Age of AI’, he highlighted the role of human skills in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and offered the graduates valuable insights for their future professional and personal journeys.
The second part of the ceremony focused on the graduates. In a formal ceremony, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Katrin Temmen presented the certificates of congratulations to the Bachelor’s and Master’s graduates, as well as to those who had completed their doctorates.
A particular highlight was the presentation of awards for outstanding academic achievement. The recipients were:
- For the best academic achievement in a Bachelor’s programme at the Institute of Electrical Engineering: Samantha Schmidtmann for her final thesis ‘An Orientation-Based Spatio-Temporal Feature Extraction Architecture for Effective Information Recall in Reinforcement Learning’, sponsored by dSpace.
- For the best academic achievement in a Master’s programme at the Institute of Electrical Engineering: Oliver Josef Schweins for his thesis “Differentiable Predictive Control of Induction Motor Drives”, sponsored by Phoenix Contact.
- For the best academic achievement in the Bachelor’s programme at the Institute of Computer Science: Moritz Hölting for his thesis ‘Limitations of the Random Oracle Model’, sponsored by S&N Invent.
- For the best academic achievement in the Master’s programme at the Institute of Computer Science: Tim Leonhard Storm for his thesis ‘Automated Analysis of SSH Client State Machines’, sponsored by S&N Invent.
- For the best academic achievement in the Bachelor’s programme at the Institute of Mathematics: Gina Lizzy Pohlenz for her thesis ‘Simplicial Cohomology of Orbifolds’, sponsored by Wöhler.
- For the best academic achievement in a Master’s programme at the Institute of Mathematics: Luca Henry Wasmuth for his thesis ‘Spectral Theory of Transfer Operators for the Bilateral Shift’, sponsored by Achelos.
In addition, the 2026 Weierstrass Teaching Prize was awarded. The award for outstanding teaching went to Prof. Dr Johanna Schönherr. Dominik Strasser was recognised as the best tutorial group leader. The teaching prize was sponsored by Delta Energy Systems.
The faculty would like to express its sincere thanks to all the sponsors who have made it possible to honour these outstanding achievements.
Following this, Lina Widmann, Tim Hartmann and Hannes Geilhorn bid farewell to the long-serving members of the student councils.
The graduation ceremony drew to a close in a festive atmosphere at the champagne reception that followed. The Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics warmly congratulates all graduates on successfully completing their studies and wishes them all the best and every success in their future professional and personal lives.
