Lower Saxony Science Award goes to Mathematics and Chemistry student Mandy Hoffmann Outstanding achievements in two degree programmes alike

Mandy Hoffmann, a Mathematics and Chemistry student at Technische Universität Braunschweig, has received the Lower Saxony Science Award in the “Students” category by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture on 15 November. Falko Mohrs, Lower Saxony’s Minister for Science and Culture, conferred the awards for research, teaching and study to 21 members of Lower Saxony’s universities.

TU student Mandy Hoffmann receives the Science Award for her outstanding professional achievements in the Bachelor’s degree programmes in Mathematics and Chemistry, both of which she studied and completed at the same time as her main subject. A total of three students and one student project were awarded in the “Students” category of the Science Award this year. The award is endowed with 3,500 euros each.

Award winner Mandy Hoffmann

Mandy Hoffmann began her Bachelor’s studies in the winter semester 2019/2020 at the age of 15, making her at times one of the youngest students in Germany. Since completing her two Bachelor’s degree programmes, she is studying in the Master’s programme in Mathematics since the winter semester 2022/23. In her final thesis in the Mathematics degree programme, Mandy Hoffmann worked on orbit stabiliser algorithms for p-groups. In it, she compared a new trajectory stabiliser algorithm with other known algorithms and was able to prove that the new algorithm has a shorter runtime and a much lower memory requirement. In September, she also completed her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. As part of her final thesis here, she developed a self-correlation correction in hybrid density functional theory.

“To be conferred the Science Award is a great honour for me. This is great recognition for the fact that I studied two degree programmes at the same time and am now suitably broadly positioned in terms of subject matter,” says award winner Mandy Hoffmann.

Award as a mark of education quality

“I am particularly pleased that Mandy Hoffmann, a student at TU Braunschweig, has been recognised with the Science Award. The award not only recognises her outstanding academic achievements, but also shows that students already achieve top-class results on research questions in their final theses. In addition, the award underlines the extraordinary quality of education at TU Braunschweig,” praises the President of TU Braunschweig, Professor Angela Ittel.

About the award

The award winners were nominated by the universities in Lower Saxony. The selection was made by the Scientific Commission of Lower Saxony. The Science Award was presented for the 16th time. The most recent winners from TU Braunschweig were Professor Arno Kwade (award in the research category) and the student initiative MethodAid (both 2021), as well as Physics Professor Stefanie Kroker (award for young scientists) and Master’s student Michael Perk (both 2020), Physics student Corinna Schäfer (2019), Professor Dr. Regina Toepfer and Dr. Wiebke Ohlendorf in the teaching category (2018) and the team ERIG – ExperimentalRaumfahrt-InteressenGemeinschaft e.V. (2016).