Another Humboldt Professorship for the FAU

The communications engineer Robert Schober receives Germany’s highest-endowed international research award.

For the second consecutive year the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has been successful in its application for an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship: nominated by the FAU, the communications engineer Prof. Dr. Robert Schober (born 1971), has been awarded with Germany’s highest-endowed international research award. The award which is entailed with €3.5 million should secure Schober for the FAU and ensure that his excellent scientific work will continue in the future in Erlangen. German national Robert Schober currently lectures and conducts research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Robert Schober is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of electrical communication engineering and wireless communication. As an engineer, he knows exactly how to combine academic excellence with industrial application, as was the case in 1999 when, alongside his Erlangen colleagues, he developed an algorithm which is used in many modern mobile telephones. Prof. Schober is editor-in-chief of the scientific journal, the IEEE’s Transactions on Communications. This is one of the most important publications in the field of electrical communication engineering, making him one of the world’s most prominent representatives of this important specialised field of work. It is hoped Schober will play a leading role in the interdisciplinary research area of communications technology – which is one of the FAU’s eight high-profile research areas – and raise the University’s outstanding profile as an international technology centre.

“Being awarded a Humboldt Professorship is a great honour for a university. It affords the opportunity to demonstrate that the institution is highly regarded within the international scientific community. I would be delighted if we could secure Professor Schober for the FAU, not least with the help of the award money”, says FAU president Prof. Dr. Karl-Dieter Grüske.

If Prof. Schober decides in favour of the FAU he will return to his academic roots. He studied electrical engineering here in Erlangen and earned his doctorate in engineering at the FAU with Prof. Huber at the Institute for Information Transmission. Following this, he moved to Canada where he became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. In 2002, he became an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where, as a result of his exceptional scientific work, he was soon to receive a prominent research-oriented professorship known as the Canada Research Chair. In 2008 he was made full professor and deputy department head. He has received several awards, including the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Award from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2002, the Vodafone Innovation Award in 2004 and the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in 2007.

Alongside Prof. Schober, the select group of four newly appointed Alexander-von-Humboldt Professors comprises biophysicist Jochen Guck, physician Matthias Tschöp and mathematician Michael Weiss. The international prize, endowed with up to €5 million on each award, is given by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation and financed by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, and aims to attract outstanding international researchers to undertake research in Germany. The Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship Foundation honours the world’s leading researchers from all disciplines, who live and work both in Germany and abroad. Its mandate is to encourage long-term groundbreaking research at German universities. The selected award-winners will now enter into negotiations with the German universities who nominated them for the award.

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uni | media service | news No. 258/2011 on 14.10.2011