Promotion prize

Have you completed your cooperative doctorate at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts with above-average success? Or have you supervised an above-average doctorate at Fachhochschule Dortmund and would like to nominate your candidate? Then apply now for the Fachhochschule Dortmund's doctoral award!

Photo of a rolled-up degree certificate with an orange ribbon held in someone's hand. In the background, people with doctor's hats can be seen very blurred.

In order to promote young academics, recognize excellent research achievements by young scientists and increase the visibility of research results beyond the university, Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts has been awarding the annual doctoral prize of 1,000 euros from the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts' funding association(Opens in a new tab) for an outstanding cooperative doctorate from the various faculties of Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 2022.

The current call for applications for the doctoral prize can be found here. PDF-File 59,98 kB

Qualification for the award

The current call for applications is aimed at researchers with an excellent cooperative doctorate in German or English under the proven supervision of a professor at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The Doctorate Award 2025 refers to doctorates that were successfully defended in 2024.

Doctoral candidates can apply for the prize either at the suggestion of the supervisor of their thesis or independently. The completed doctorates must have been graded at least "magna cum laude".

Registration at the Graduate Center(Opens in a new tab) of Fachhochschule Dortmund is a prerequisite for application, but can also be done during the application process. The registration serves to record all ongoing and completed doctorates. Click here(Opens in a new tab) to register directly.

Review process

The review process is a three-stage procedure: After a formal review by the Graduate Center of Fachhochschule Dortmund, a pre-selection is made by the Senate Commission for Research, Development and Transfer (KII)(Opens in a new tab) . The prize is awarded by a high-caliber jury made up of representatives from universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes and research associations.

Composition of the 2025 jury

Evaluation criteria

Application

Application deadline: April 11, 2025, 12 noon

Applicants are requested to send their documents in electronic form in German or English to promotionskollegfh-dortmundde. Please submit everything except the dissertation itself in one PDF file.

Documents to be submitted

Forms to download

Your contact person

Prize winner 2023: Dr. Nadine Richter

Dr. Nadine Richter began her academic career in 2011 at the Fachhochschule Dortmund with a Bachelor's degree in Social Work, followed by a Master's degree in Social Sustainability and Demographic Change. She began working at Fachhochschule Dortmund during her bachelor's degree - first as a tutor and later as a research assistant. Since 2017, she has been a research assistant in the Faculty of Applied Social Studies, where she worked on the PsyKo-Mobil project until 2021. She is currently working on the GenoMobil(Opens in a new tab) research project, where she can also integrate the content of her dissertation.

Her dissertation "Being mindful, living sustainable: Relationships between mindfulness, well-being and pro-environmental behavior" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Marcel Hunecke(Opens in a new tab) from the Fachhochschule Dortmund and Prof. Dr. Maike Luhmann (Ruhr University Bochum) and completed with magna cum laude at the Ruhr University Bochum in 2022.

Dr. Nadine Richter on the doctoral prize: "The prize means a lot to me. Especially in the last few years, when the pandemic was going on, I really had a hard time [...] working on my doctoral thesis.
And I think everyone who is working on something like this now also knows how difficult it is in between, and on the one hand it's an honor to receive such an award and on the other hand I also think it's an appreciation of this topic. My work was about sustainability and it means something to me when work on this topic, which I find very important, is recognized."

Interview with the award winner

Portrait of Nadine Richter__Portrait of Nadine Richter

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Prof. Dr. Marcel Hunecke comments on the prizewinner's work as her supervisor:

"Through the integrated analysis of the three topics of mindfulness, environmental behavior and psychological well-being, Dr. Richter's dissertation makes a current and independent contribution to environmental psychology and sustainability psychology, in which aspects of emotion regulation in environmental behavior are linked in an innovative way with aspects of psychological well-being.
The dissertation is based on three independent empirical studies, the scientific excellence of which is documented by the publication in three different peer-reviewed international journals."

The university's supervisor, Prof. Dr. Meike Luhmann, is also positive:

"The dissertation addresses a highly topical issue: Which individual factors contribute to people behaving in a climate-friendly way?
One of these relevant individual factors could be mindfulness. The basic thesis of this dissertation is that mindfulness is positively related to both climate-friendly behaviors and various facets of well-being. The theoretical model on which this thesis is based has been neatly translated into empirically testable questions in this dissertation and the studies follow a clear common thread.
Highly sophisticated statistical methods were used in all studies, e.g. complex structural equation modeling and longitudinal data methods. This is a sophisticated piece of work that has been well implemented and makes an important contribution to research on the relevance of mindfulness."