New faces

Mohammad Adibzade and Jonathan Scholz joined our group as PhD students in 2025. Luc de Montella joined our group as a PostDoctoral researcher. Mohammad started in July as an IMPRS fellow. He will work on experimental design and training of hybrid models, and applications in chemical engineering. Jonathan started in October, funded by the Center for Dynamic Systems and co-supervised by Marlin Ulmer. Luc started in November. He will work on topics of complexity reduction and digitalization, funded by the Center for Dynamic Systems. Welcome to the group!

Completion of theses

Mirko Hahn defended his thesis Fast Methods for Mixed-Integer PDE-Constrained Optimization. He defined the new state-of-the-art in optimization using geodesics with applications in ODE and PDE constrained mixed-integer optimal control problems. Michael Ulbrich was the second reviewer of the thesis.

Jonathan Scholz defended his Master thesis Solving Large Constrained Clustering Problems successfully. Sophia Rist finished her Master thesis Modellierung und Optimierung nachhaltiger industrieller Transformationsprozesse. Daniel Lippert defended his Bachelor thesis Mathematische Grundlagen moderner Schachengines: ein Überblick von der Alpha-Beta-Suche bis AlphaZero.

Conferences and social events

There were several interesting conferences. We are proud that Timon managed to get two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2025.

We co-organized the 3rd SmartProSys Symposium from September 29 to October 1. Among the many excellent speakers with interdisciplinary background, there were also three good friends from optimization: Sven Leyffer, Victor Zavala, and Larry Biegler.

We contributed with 2 teams to the Firmenstaffellauf of OVGU. Also our team participated successfully in the student soccer tournament organized by the Fachschaft Mathematik.